I didn’t blog yesterday. But I have been thinking about Lewis Hyde’s comment (in his book, The Gift) that the scientist works in solitude but cannot be isolated.

My immediately thought was that this is true for me as a musician and reader. Solitude is an important part of my operating procedure. I need and get large amounts of it. This enables me to think, rehearse and make stuff. Like blogs. Like poems and songs and instrumental composistions.

I live in what often seems to me to be an intellectually hostile environment. Whether this is just my little city of Holland Michigan or the USA or just generally a human phenomenon is not clear to me. But I realize that living in a small conservative town inevitably leads to some isolation. I often say to myself that it is silly to expect large amounts of  companionship and colleagiality in such a barren situation. And I am usually content to live in the margins of this situation and currently have no need to change it.

But it a mistake to isolate one’s self. Connection is basic to the human, I think. Connection to loved ones and others who share interests and passions. At this point in my life, my connection to those who share my interests and passions are mainly on the web and in my books and music.

I was listening to an old Selected Shorts pod cast this morning in which  they interviewed the librarian at the historic Edith Wharton Home about the library.  Apparently I share Wharton’s experience of books as friends and colleagues.

I am connected to many minds great and small through their writings. Not only books, but poetry and music. And I am lucky enough to not just listen to music (although that is a pleasure of my life) but also make it. When playing the compositions of another, I feel that I am in a sort of suspended place in which I am in the presence of another and the beauty the other has created.

Last night I played Mozart and Bach on the piano as the wedding guests were being  seated. I feel like Bach is someone I relate to and that Mozart has a bit of a wider appeal in this setting, joie de vivre and all. But yesterday I found myself in dialogue with Bach. As the crowd noise increased and I sensed that the music was no longer needed to put people at ease before the cermony I quit playing repretoire on the piano and moved to improvising on the organ.

I have had listeners tell me that when I improvise I make some of my best music. I wonder if this is because the music is not twice removed from the experience as it is in performing great composers. By this I mean the listener is dependent on the performer to connect to the beauty and ideas of the composer. When one is improvising one is speaking directly to the listener or at least someone or something is speaking.

All this is to say that when I write on my blog or  improvise or rehearse music or read I do not feel isolated. Rather I am as connected as my aging and tired brain will let me be. This is a blessing in my life. And a necessity.

I have dedicated my life to something that is not as important as making sure humans have food and shelter. Nevertheless I am convinced that music (and the arts) are integral in what makes us human. Admittedly this is an intuitive conclusion.

I have developed an admiration for things that are useless by utilitarian standards but necessary by any real standard. I include in this list not only music and the arts, but taking time to be human. Useless beauty helps me feel more connected to myself. I think that neuroscience is beginning to understand this connection as something that is literally happening inside my head, but that’s not important to me. what’s important to me is the sort of timeless conversation I enter into when I perform another composer’s work. I think that the music of the past says some very important things to me and I continue to need it and perform it. But I think that music that is made up by breathing (or recently breathing) people is often successful in its ability to help me connect to myself in a new broken brutal and fragmented contemporary existence.

As Zappa used to put on his albums: “the contemporary composer refuses to die.” He is quoting Varese who was dead at the time. Now Zappa is too.

The summer is slipping by and I haven’t done any recording. Worse yet, I’m beginning to wonder about my relationship to recording. I am pretty disatisfied with most of the recordings of my work. At the same time I find myself wondering about where I am supposed to perform music.

I play weekly at church for love and money. I do enjoy performing there. This is probably due to the unique nature of the gig. For example this Sunday I am featuring a guest artist acquaintance of mine, Jordan VanHemert, on sax. We will be performing Coltrane’s “Dear Lord,” a Handel 6/8 movement of a little baroque sonata and postluding with Wayne Shorter’s “Black Nile.” This is some nice music.

The hymns the congregation sings can by anything from modern gospel music to stuffy anglican hymnody and everything in between including a healthy dose of world music. My boss just got back from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church (where she spoke in support of the resolution to recognize same sax unions…. hoo hah!!!!) and commented to me yesterday it was the first convention where she felt that the music at our parish overlapped or was connected to the eclectic practice used and condoned at the national convention.

In two weeks, I have arranged for five parishioners to perform a movement from Bach’s Cantata 84. The words of this cantata relate to the readings of the day. The performers are all professional or semi-professional musicians.

So everything’s copacetic at church.

But I continue to thrive on the internet and not find very many like minded musicians locally to play and talk to. It’s probably largely due to my own intensity and lack of conformity to the local notions of who I should be and what I should look like.

In the past few years I have found satisfaction performing in coffee houses and busking my own material (mostly) on the street. But this satisfaction is ebbing. I haven’t really found a following in the coffee houses. I probably don’t perform often enough and again I am sort of an odd duck being an overweight 57 year old with a pony tail and an educated attitude. This year I am second on the bill on August 21st at LemonJellos. The musicians I have invited to play with me are finding themselves unable to make the gig. I have to rent an accoustic piano ( I HAVE to rent the piano…. electric just doesn’t cut it any more)

The local busking permits grew out of an initiative by local shop owners to get some foot traffic going in our little downtown. It has exploded into a crowded bustling circus (litterally with acrobats and jugglers and what not) on Thursday evenings. Eileen and I avoided the downtown because of it last night and ate at a restaurant north of town. But the organizers don’t seem to think there is a tipping point to the number of posts available for musicians (and other hawkers) to entertain on the street. I quit doing this Thursday night gig a few years ago when I couldn’t hear my own music due to the proximity of other musicians.

I could of course go out and busk at other times. But I can’t seem to find musicians who are interested in busking with me and it’s kind of a bummer to do it by myself every time.

So this is where I’m at. Wondering if I could design a better web site on which I could more clearly present my compositions and ideas. I am thinking of abandoning recording until I can get some good professional help with it and just linking to free sheet music of my compositions. I have tons of pdf files sitting on my host which are waiting for me to relink them (this web site has crashed repeatedly and I am working on getting it designed and reconfigured).

So there you have it. I continue to compose and practice and perform. And mostly think about music and what it is and what it does.

I think music is something one does actively not passively. This means constantly thinking and analyzing what you are doing. This means active performing not limited to what is found on recordings. And active listening not limited to listening to recordings.

And that it makes the doers more human.

I

nstead of reading the NYT online this morning while treadmilling, I messed about with twitter. I am now following 88 people/institutions. I say institutions because  many bookstores, publishers, radio stations and music groups have a twitter account going. The American Booksellers Association appears to have someone twittering. Very interesting.

Now if I could just get this web site a bit less out of the box and flexible.

Yesterday my lovely daughter Sarah suggested some web building freeware (NVU, KompoZer, Amaya)  She found them on A+Freeware. Thank you Sarah.

I’m not that worried about making the web pages at this point. I’m more concerned about figuring out how my webhost (BluHost) means for users to redo the domain pointers. Last time wordpress locked me out as admin, my brother redid stuff and I’m not sure what all he changed. I think he tinkered inside some files and he probably won’t remember. (I would say hi to you Mark but I don’t think you’re doing that much online stuff like reading my blog and facebook and such).

Anyway, twitter instantly connected me to a bunch of people and I’m very interested in the conversation. Cory Doctorow (from over at BoingBoing) had a very interesting twitter this morning…. I already linked it into Facebook but in case you missed it:

This is a witty answer to all of the nonsense of user end agreements that we all sign all our rights away by simply tearing off the shrink wrap or signing a credit card. Very cool.

I haven’t figured out the “tiny urls” twitterers seem to use to do links, but it’s only a matter of poking around.

Reading this book review this morning on Slate: What’s Romantic about Science: when science became a source of sublime terror by Adam Hirsch.

A taste:

“The perception of truth is almost always as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty… and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind.”

Humphy Davy (who is apparently the 19 century scientist who isolated the elements of sodium, iodine and clorine for the first time in his lonely lab)

quoted in the book Hirsch is reviewing in the article:  The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes

Makes me think the book might kind of fun.

As I mentioned on Facebook, yesterday, I had a nice compliment from the dance instructor at the Ceccetti dance camp. I have loved the paintings of Degas since I was a kid. I wonder if that has anything to do with my appreciation of dance.

The way this works is that the instructor (who is a highly disciplined dancer and ballet teacher), outlines routines for the students involving basic ballet moves. She calls out the moves by their French name (frappe, grand de jamb). Then she looks at the pianist and says ok.

Some years ago, I was invited to do this but given no prep. When the instructor looked at me, I had no idea what she wanted other than the fact that I was suppose to now supply the music. I quickly learned to follow the instructions closely, especially the body language and tempo of the instructor. Then I improvise strict 8 measure phrases.

Interestingly enough, I also quickly learned that dancers follow melody as much as rhythm.

Of course body movement is basic to musicality. And ballet is such a wonderful discipline with strict classroom etiquette, that I quickly fell in love with doing this camp once a year.

They usually import a bunch of instructors and pianists. I am the local yokel that they use for last minute substitutions.

Enrollment is down. They only asked me to cover two classes instead of the usual ten to twenty. They pay pretty good. And unlike so many of the artistic types I rub shoulders with, they seem to appreciate my musicality.

It’s a great challenge to improvise little melodies for an hour and twenty minutes, but it’s also rewarding in an odd modest way.

Yesterday the instructor indicated that I would be a candidate as a pianist for the Grand Rapids Ballet Company. I told her we could sure discuss it and gave her my numbers. Not sure anything will come of it, but it is nice to be appreciated.

On a different note, I continue to think that Rheingold and others (yesterday’s link to an article about how good teachers are reconsidering IT in the classroom) are definitely on to something about the sophistication needed to learn in an IT environment.

Actually I think this sophistication is necessary in any environment.

As I was taught a bit about research in grad school, my natural skepticism was reinforced by learning research tools about verification of sources.

Now when I talk to people, I realize that often their orientation is pragmatic to their own small circle of understanding. But the idea of expanding that circle to include questions they haven’t thought of and examining the origin of their own notions and information seems pretty rare. I think an inquiring skeptical mind is essential to the continuation of learning. When I see the light of curiosity ebb in a person’s eyes, it seems a bit sad to me. I feel once again limited in my interaction with others. Staring at a screen can only exacerbate such slowing brain activity.

So reading Howard Rheingold, has convinced me to give Twitter a more active try. Logged on and started following at least the people who are following me (mostly fam, one old friend). He defines Twitter as a “rolling present.” And mentions that he finds it a good way to start his day with wordflow and “something lightweight.”

In addition to my fam and friends I thought it would be fun to follow people I am interested in. Oops. I searched for several composers and musicians and surprisingly they weren’t active on twitter. I’ll just have to keep thinking about who is breathing that I would like to follow.

Last night, my fingers strayed from Beethoven, Brahms and Brubeck (see facebook status thingo) to Bach and Scarlatti.

Yesterday I went out and bought a filtered coffee maker, since I (dang!) threw away the ones I used to own recently (trying to trim down a bit). So far the coffee is awful. I am thinking I could try this until my next blood test in October and see if my mildly high cholesterol goes down at all. My daughter Sarah facebooked me this link to FORA.tv – Nancy Snyderman: Medical Myths That Can Kill You

I watched just enough to wonder if  there was something to Snyderman’s experience with lowering her own cholesterol via switching to filtered coffee. What the heck.

I composed for about ten minutes yesterday. Straightened up (but not in a final way) the second phrase of the piece I am working on. Spent the rest of my composition time creating an active RL (real life) file of songs and pieces that I’m interested in. I am very frustrated right now that I have tons of material (compositions and ideas for compositions) squirreled away in my house in various places. I would like to have it organized so that I could lay my hands on it easily if I wanted to.  I have been keeping a composition journal for a while. That’s helpful.

Anyway, I started sorting several years worth of scores to my coffee house type gigs. Sorting out my own compositions from “covers.” Right now I am feeling increasingly alienated from my natural community of musicians and composers. I had hoped this blog would connect me a bit more. I do check other people’s blogs quite a bit and comment once in a while. But I am very unhappy with this blog set-up. I think the visuals put people off. Better design = quicker access and communication. I still want to revamp this dam thing, but lack the courage to embark on even an update of wordpress, much less and re-design from the bottom up.

On several of the blogs I admire, I notice that the blogger (who is often a musician or thinker or basically not a geek) acknowledges the help of another. Yesterday I couldn’t even think of anyone I have access to that is better at IT than me (this excludes my talented family…. I am hesitant to ask them for this kind of help. My brother has developed a fine hate/love relationship with IT, my daughters both do it for money so it seems like a creepy thing to ask them to help …. hello Elizabeth and Sarah…. If you guys lived closer maybe I could bribe you or something into helping me but since you are in NY and the UK I would rather spend the time I get with you catching up on stuff instead of messing with my dang blog.)

Anyway I’m only going to do one blog today. Ahem.

FWIW, I think this article is interesting: When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom by Jerome R. Young. (p.s. link broken try here)

“Strangely enough, the people who are most resistant to this model are the students, who are used to being spoon-fed material that is going to be quote unquote on the test,” says Mr. Heffernan. “Students have been socialized to view the educational process as essentially passive. The only way we’re going to stop that is by radically refiguring the classroom in precisely the way José [ José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, SMU]wants to do it.”

Rheingold makes his students close their computers and turn off phones in his classroom. It has to do with “attention.” Bown is interested in what students retain from their education. They don’t remember power points, he maintains, they remember discussions. I haven’t finished reading this article, but so far it’s fascinating. If I were still be allowed in the classroom as a teacher, I would definitely podcast lectures and encourage in-class stuff. As it was, I didn’t use power point, so much as overhead projections of stuff I found online, mostly Youtube stuff for music. I also played piano for my students as well (horrors!) sang to them (“It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing….”).

Enough.

I have to pick out hymns for work…. sorry no time for pics again today.

Okay. The previous post was the usual Steve drivel. Now to the surfing stuff. I have been reading Rheingold’s article, “Crap Detection 101.” He comes up with some basic ideas about how to utilize the web effectively and accurately.

Rheingold:
Again, it’s up to the consumer of the information to decide which images, videos, tweets are authentic. As always happens when there is a high demand for separating signal from noise, people began to put together filters for doing that – and human tools for sorting the more trustworthy information.

His article is full of handy links.

Here are few I liked:

by Marc Ambinder

Follow The Developments In Iran Like A CIA Analyst by Mark Ambinder

Rheingold quotes this one:

Ambinder recommends watching for disinformation,

looking for patterns in the geographic location of sources (but warns against assuming that everything that resembles a pattern really is one),

examining your assumptions

and looking for sources that contradict them.

Easy Who is.com

This is a tool R shows his fourteen year old daughter to use as one source check.

This is another: It’s the “Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index”

The 2007 index compiles overall institutional rankings on 375 universities that offer the Ph.D. degree. One can use it to check on the authority of an expert.

R recommends finding at least three verifications of any questionable fact or credential. Cool beans.

A free soft ware called Publish or Perish.

Here’s the blurb from the site:

Are you applying for tenure, promotion or a new job? Do you want to include evidence of the impact of your research? Is your work cited in journals which are not ISI listed? Then you might want to try Publish or Perish, designed to help individual academics to present their case for research impact to its best advantage.

And of course FactChecked.org.

A couple other articles in the NYT that caught my attention this morning:

What History is Good For by David M. Kennedy. Haven’t finished this one yet, but I do like the title.

Don’t Touch ‘A Moveable Feast’ by  A. E. HOTCHNER

At first I was skeptical about this article’s description on the NYT home page: Hemingway’s work was intended for publication, and Scribner should have protected it. But as it turns out, it wasn’t about protecting copyright from the public, instead it was about protecting the integrity of Hemingway’s work posthumously from his dang relatives. Makes sense:

As an author, I am concerned by Scribner’s involvement in this “restored edition.” With this reworking as a precedent, what will Scribner do, for instance, if a descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald demands the removal of the chapter in “A Moveable Feast” about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, or if Ford Madox Ford’s grandson wants to delete references to his ancestor’s body odor.

Finally, “Lost in the Cloud” by Jonathon Zittrain

As usual I seem to see the internet a bit differently that people thinking so economically. But still it’s kind of interesting.

For the last year or so, I have struggled to preserve my Monday as a sort of weekly sabbatical. I have been under pressures that have weakened my mental capacity and stamina. Not just the fact of being a primary caregiver for my mother and father. Not just burying my father. Not just the craziness of living in a local environment of bigotry and ignorance (the USA?). Not just attempting to do church work with integrity when I myself have extremely deep doubts. Not just watching my body age. Not just reconciling my passion to other’s tepidness. All of these and more seem to have drowned my self and made functioning a struggle.

Yesterday was a great example. After finishing my blog, I began looking around for the music that I planned to perform at church. The two pieces were drawn from some of the very earliest (15th c.) keyboard music in the Buxheimer collection. My copy was a photocopy in a manila file. This is pertinent. I had rehearsed the day before. I remembered just before I left the church resetting my presets for these pieces. But now in the craziness of stuff at home and at church the music was nowhere to be found. To shorten an hour or so of frustration, after two trips back and forth between home and church, I did not find the music. I had lost my prelude and postlude.

This actually worked out fine. I did a piano improv on the closing South African hymn for the prelude. And I simply played the late Skinner Chavez-Melo’s lovely hymn tune RAQUEL, the opening hymn, as written for the postlude.  He had provided two harmonizations, one for the first two stanzas and a more elaborate one with descant for the third. I quite like this hymn tune.

Also before service I noticed that my weekly music-notes was missing from the bulletin. I remembered writing the note and wondered why it had been omitted. I fired up the netbook and discovered I had written it but not emailed it to the secretary. Sheesh.

Usually I see such low functioning as sign posts of stress and burnout.

Later in the afternoon I was speaking with someone and told them that I had buried my father recently. They replied they knew that and that they had attended the funeral. Ahem. Oh. Yes I remember now.

I have been attending to my own stuff recently. I have been walking on a treadmill 40 minutes a day for a few months. I had an echo cardiagram done (no results yet). Today I am going to arrange for the colonoscopy my doctor asked me to get. I have been trying to moderate my drinking and have been dropping about a pound a week for a few weeks.

But obviously all of this is not enough. So today it occurred to me to set aside Monday for stuff like composing and organizing my compositions and books, staring out the window, reworking this stupid stupid web site. I wonder if I can keep this up. It sounds good now.

I have always been a person who struggles. It’s part of my identity. I ask questions and analyze. I don’t accept givens easily. I think this drives people away from me so I try to only share with those who seem receptive like my immediate family and my boss.

Maybe the stress is part of my struggle. Maybe I need to make bread more often. Who knows?

Just listened to 30 minutes or so of this video. I was on boingboing. Then it stopped. I couldn’t get it to play past a certain point. But I still got quite a bit out of it. I especially liked his description of how he came to use and understand the internet. I had a similar experience. He begins talking about how he witnessed a significant change in the authority of the published word. I think his academia is showing.

I can remember the first time a college library reference worker googled when answering my question about what time it was in a certain part of Indiana. I was amazed that this was the way he did it. Indiana, if you don’t know, has at least one or two little pockets of time zones that are different from the rest of the state. I figured this librarian would have a better handle on web sites with reputable authority. He couldn’t answer my question using google.

I remember converting to having qualified confidence in wikipedia when I realized the many reference books (mostly but not all in my field of music and poetry) I had found serious errors in. I also realized that critical awareness and consumption (one of Rheingold five integral aspects of 20th cent literacy) was something I had been attempting for years. Especially regarding mass media like tv and movies.

I cultivate approaching things as though they were  a “made” thing which needs to be observed critically , contextually and carefully in order to be understood and used.

Anyway, for those of you not checking out the video here’s the Facebook like synopsis.

20th century literacy is not only skills but skills plus community

There are five necessary mutual fluencies in it. Attention, participation, cooperation, critical consumption and network awareness.

An interesting synchronicity occured just now. I was looking at a book in the reading room (bathroom). Reading in it actually. The book’s name is “Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture.” It’s author is William L. Benzon. I bought it at a used book shop in the UK. Read a bit in it enough to know that the author’s topic and eloquence are interesting enough to continue reading it (at some point). Recently a high school band director waiting for his son in my living room picked it up and perused it but did not comment on it. Just now I flipped it over and found a blurb by Howard Rheingold on the back. I love it when that shit happens.

Onward and upward.

Kyle Gann has some interesting words in a recent post on his blog.

Speaking of titular colonicity (a term that has entered my vocabulary permanently), as we were, there’s another universal constant in academic writing that sends shivers up my spine: “lies outside the scope of this paper.” (I just Googled it and got 335,000 sites.) It appears so consistently once in every academic paper that you couldn’t force me to write it with two thugs twisting my arm. And yet, when I wrote my article “La Monte Young’s The Well-Tuned Piano” for Perspectives of New Music, the editors inserted it:

He goes on to quote the passage. Can you imagine that? The dang editor inserted that nonsense. Yikes.

Click on the pic below to see more of some upcoming Tate Liverpool Piccasso exhibition.

Adolf Hitler and his inner circle may have been a gang of thugs and murderers, but they imagined themselves to be nothing less than the saviors and guardians of high civilization.

When Otto Klemperer was dismissed as director of the Berlin State Opera because of his Jewish ancestry, he fled to Switzerland, disdaining a job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic until he discovered a warrant had been issued in Germany for his arrest. (By yet another twist of fate, his son, Werner, ended up playing a comical Nazi officer in the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes.”)

I didn’t blog yesterday because I spent my blogging time working on a new piece for tenor sax and piano. I have been thinking about writing an instrumental for some time. I began working thinking I could throw something together if even in draft form for a week from this Sunday. Jordan is playing at my church and we have discussed a prelude and an offertory but not a postlude.

I began working and discovered there was too much to the piece to be done in two or three days to allow for rehearsal. I asked Jordan to read through 16  or so measures anyway yesterday. Boy what a luxury.

This morning I managed to get my online bookmarking thingo (diggolet) reinstalled.

I don’t know if you know about these free services, but there are web sites on which you can bookmark pages, highlight text on them and leaves margin notes for yourself.

I began using diggolet after the New York Times discontinued its online individualized archiving. (Another reason to quit paying them for their stuff) When the NYT did that they bounced me over to a service called Furl. Furl lasted about six or so months. Then Furl crashed and passed me on to diggolet.

Recently, my dang browser forgot my logon for diggolet. It provides an in-browser bookmarker. That is, I can be on a page and click on my browser and it will save the page for me. I’m not sure quite how browser memories of log-ons and passwords work, but they seem sometimes to arbitrarily go away. That’s what happened this time.

I idiotically decided on the spot that I probably didn’t need the service. So I deleted the link.

Then later I realized that I really benefit from being able to go back to certain pages and re-read or examine them. It’s a bit different from bookmarking sites I revisit. It’s more like clipping. Which is how I began doing this. Clipping articles from the NYT about wars all over the world in the late nineties.

So anyway this morning I managed to figure out how to get my browser bookmarker guy, diggolet, working again. Sheesh. Ain’t tech great?

BTW my 82 year-old Mom emailed a letter to the local paper. You can click here and read it. Way to go, Mom.

Surfing the net while treading my treadmill this morning, I felt like the silver surfer. It seems to me a universe of ideas is available on the net only waiting for me to imagine what is possible.

lat

And lately I have been finding Youtube a lot like the old Napster. Sort of a celestial jukebox. Yes.

Of course, I know I’m just fat guy, probably with a bad heart, working up a sweat peering into a tiny screen.

But, wow, what things I can find on that screen. But enough.

Yesterday night I picked up an old copy of American Scholar I have laying around. I have kept it, because it has an interview with Marcel Duchamp in it. ‘Bout time I read the dang thing.  So I did.

Duchamp keeps popping up on my radar throughout my life. So I was gratified to read this.

I think painting dies, you understand. After forty or fifty years a picture dies, because its freshness disappears. Sculpture also dies. This is my own little hobbyhorse, which no one accepts, but I don’t mind. I think a picture dies after a few years like the man who painted it. Afterward it’s called the history of art. There’s a huge difference between a Monet today, which is black as anything, and a Monet sixty or eighty years ago, when it was brilliant, when it was made. Now it has entered into history—it’s accepted as that, and anyway that’s fine, because that has nothing to do with what it is. Men are mortal, pictures too.

American Scholar Spring 1971, p. 280 (also  in  Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabbanne)

I probably don’t exactly agree with Duchamp, but I think he is on to something. I have expressed it a bit differently saying that contemporary art and music (by that I only mean art and music created by people still alive) can say something unique to the observer/listener, something that cannot be said in quite the same way by historical art and music.

At the same time I have to agree with Jeremy Denk who said in the entry I linked yesterday that

Bach must have felt the intervals [SBJ note: intervals are the measured distance between two notes of music] were his friends, don’t you think? His best buds. He was closer to understanding them than anyone in history–their possibilities, their limitations, their quirks. Actually, let’s not kid ourselves: It is largely through his understanding of them that we now understand them. And here he is, Bach is explaining to us the circle of his closest friends, introducing us to them … Like a good friend too he is showing us their good sides, but without mythologizing them: they have their “rough spots.” (Knowing the weak spots, the thorny corners of each interval, knowing these deeply, might be one way to define “mastery of counterpoint.”)

So I guess historical music (and art too) has an importance for me. I have this thought about Shakespeare as well. I think I first read it in Harold Bloom’s work. That Shakespeare fundamentally affeccted the way Western Civ people see themselves as people.  Not to mention their language.

I can’t resist adding this lovely phrase that Denk wrote back in May on his blog:

a life’s wounds bandaged with music and then the music itself becomes the wound.

I like that quite a bit.

And then there’s Enderby’s Muse who says this about posterity anyway.

Posterity… The poet addresses posterity. And what is posterity? Schoolmarms with snotty kids trailing round the monuments. The poet’s tea-mug with an ingrained ring of tannin-stain. The poet’s love-letters. The poet’s falling hair, trapped in brush-bristles rarely washed. The poet’s little failings — well-hidden, but not for ever. And the kids are bored, and their texts are covered with thumb-marks and dirty little marginalia. They’ve read the poem, oh yes. They’re posterity. Enderby Outside by Anthony Burgess

“Snotty kids trailing round monuments.” Burgess can sure coin a telling phrase, eh?

This brings back me to how much fun I had this morning goofing off with the web. I continue to explore a new web site I have found called Poemhunter.com. I still remember a teacher in high school telling me that poetry was more pertinent and important than anything in any newspaper. I haven’t quite shaken the feeling he’s right. Sometimes when I am perusing headlines I read for Dylan Thomas or Walt Whitman and find a breath of fresh human brutal air.

Since I am a lover of words, i found David Skinner’s entertaining and enlightening article, “Ain’t that the Truth: Webster’s Third: the most controversial dictionary in the English language,” very interesting. Not only does he take one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, to task, he gives some fascinating (to me anyway) background and history about American dictionaries, specifically the Webster brand.

While it was sometimes unclear whether W3 was written for lexicographers or for people who didn’t know what a door was, it was certainly a quirky dictionary.

W3 is the Webster’s Third Edition.

Finally, I do use Youtube like I used to use Napster. There are tons of recordings on it. I have been plugging speakers into my little netbook and using them to listen. Not bad. Here’s one from this morning.

There are an incredible number of bright blogging music types that I read from time to time. Mostly but not all composers.

Many seem to be pleasurably drunk on music and words. It’s so counter to the notion that images are the current prevalent language of ideas and art. I like it.

Recently, I found myself clicking on sound links and listening to quite a bit of stuff.

For example there’s the incredible pianist, Jeremy Denk.

I have been reading his blog for a while.  He is particularly word drunk and fun to read. In a recent entry he raves about the Goldberg Variations of Bach which he has recently performed at Symphony Space. He illustrates his commentary with music notation and recordings. If you love the Goldberg Variations the way I do, it’s fun reading.

Then there’s Nico Muhly. I got caught on his blog today. Anyone who can write like this about Britten is okay in my book:

Ooh, all this talk about Britten makes me want to listen on the last chorale & descant from Midsummer so bad right now. Here’s that: <link to sound clip of Britten’s Now the Hungry Lion Roars from Act III of A Midsummer Night’s Dream LSO/Davis>

Now bitches, you want to talk about Precious? Hear that dotted rhythm, how Davis does it:

But then you listen to Benjamin Britten conducting the LSO <link to sound clip>

and his shit is all:

That is a seriously affected way to render out that rhythm, but it’s his to render, and I think it’s so beautiful, to have this secret five flowing over the whole

Very fine. I also like his book review and reviews of other people’s reviews and writing.

Over old mother NPR, William Bolcolm makes an interesting appearance on the show, “From the Top.” If you don’t know this show, it highlights live performances of young musicians who are so brilliant as to make this old hack weep. Very cool. Bolcolm’s music is featured in a recent episode. Click here to listen to it. Click here for the web site. I am learning an organ piece by Bolcolm.

Finally, here’s a little article about what makes popular music popular. The Science of Hit Songs by Bjorn Carey. It turns out, it matters a great deal if others like something. Heh.

cool animation at the end of this

Thoughts of my own mortality have dogged me all my life. When I was sixteen, I thought I would never live to be twenty and so on.

This morning I am scheduled to take an electro echocardiogram. They use sound to make a picture of your heart. I think it might be likely that they will find some pretty serious damage. I have an enlarged heart and have been diagnosed with a heart murmer. My uncle Richard died of a corronary around my age. I am over weight.

I have only recently begun exercising with any regularity. I only started in the hopes it would help my brain, not the heart.

Speaking of the brain, I ran across this article today:

In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder – self-organised criticality. Disordely Genius: how chaos drives the brain by David Robinson, New Scientist

“The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses.”

This makes me wonder about insight and also artistic inspiration (the muse). Hmmm.

Also, having recently witnessed my father’s long demise from dementia, I have been watching the mirror closely. How does one know one is losing one’s faculties? It reminds me of the old movie/short story/novel “Flowers for Algernon/Charlie.”

In fact it made me wonder about the inspiration for the idea the story of someone becoming super intelligent and then foreseeing their own rapid decline. When is the person gone? How do lingering remnants of personality remain? Who is left?

The scene at the end of Brazil: “I think we’re losing him.” Indeed.

For that matter, there’s the whole idea that our personality constantly changes. We are different today than yesterday. What consistent behavior and thought patterns constitute the personality? Inconsistent behavior?

Who knows?

A bit morbid today. I’ll leave off with this wonderful old cartoon.

1. Calder invented the mobile as an art form in 1931.

2. Marcel Duchamp coined the word, “mobile,” to describe Calder’s work.

3. Jean Arp coined the word, “stabile,” to describe Calder’s work that suggests movement but doesn’t move.

4. 40 years ago, Calder installed “The Grand Vitesse” in downtown Grand Rapids. The sculpture was commissioned by the city. It’s name is a play on the French for “Grand Rapids.”

5. Calder died in 1976. He was born in Pennsylvania.

6. My daughter Elizabeth is using a kind of watercolor to make paintings. It’s called gouache. Calder used it extensively. I saw a bunch of his paintings in this medium yesterday.

7. One of his paintings shows people climbing on and fishing from “The Grand Vitess.”

8. There are guards in the museum section of the Frederick Meijers Garden that will stop you from climbing on the smaller Calder model of the Grand Vitesse.

9. They also will stop you from photographing it.

10. Art museums are a lot like classical music concerts. They make me uncomfortable at the same time they draw me into the art and music. But don’t touch. Or make noise.

11. There are wonderful outdoor sculptures in the children’s garden at the Frederick Meijer’s Garden that seemed designed for children to climb all over. These also have signs that say don’t touch. (I guess that means prohibits climbing on as well.) The picture above is not from the Meijer’s garden.

12. Steve and Eileen like Sophie Ryder’s work.

13. A lot.

I am now officially New York Timeless. The bad news is that there is no pain. I read today’s paper online while treadmill. Easy as pie. The only drawback I can think of is that  I have to be someplace I can connect to wifi in order to read the paper.

When I can’t connect I have 168 books on my little net book hard drive to peruse. Also I can either keep my browser open on articles I want to read or even copy them to a text doc.

I guess that’s what happens when a consumer like me is thwarted by a newspaper unwilling to market their stufff easily. I was ready to swtich to a paid online subscription. But they couldn’t take my order. I had to wait until the paper subscription stopped. Well hey it stopped. But in the meantime I’m really thinking of just getting my news online.

I have a google RSS page connected in to most major news organizations. As well as a page each of links for liberal and for conservative news sites.

Eileen’s birthday is tomorrow. We are celebrating by preordering her three games for her Nintendo DS (already done). We went out to eat last night at Everyday People Cafe.

This morning after we hit the Farmer’s Market we are off to visit Meijer Garden in Grand Rapids. They have a Calder show right now.

Life is good. Except we had water on the porch this morning. I was running around putting pots under drips. Eileen called the roofer.

Spent a good deal of time preparing the following compositions yesterday:

Psalm 110 PDF and Miranda PDF

The text was assigned by Nick Palmer to the group of composers he convened last month. We meet again today. I’m in a rush to get going to attend this, so I don’t have time for my usual fascinating prose and pics (grin).

Instead here are a few links:

Childhood is a branch of cartography.

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood by Michael Chabon, New York Review of Books link

Also about geography here’s a fascinatingly weird kooky article about “seasteading” which seems to be a libertarian wet dream of living free of government in communities on the high seas.

Friedman called his theory “dynamic geography.” He remembered a line from his dad’s book The Machinery of Freedom about how differently terrestrial government would behave if everyone lived in trailers and could easily flee state oppression. If land itself could get up and go, the incentive structure of government would change even more, moving it in a libertarian direction.

20,000 Nations Above the Sea: Is floating the last, best hope for liberty? by Brian Doherty Reasononline link

With 16 fun filled days of crazy Michael Jackson, the fact that he was buried without a brain is my favorite story. I had to think of the Scarecrow role in the Wiz….

Michael Jackson to be buried without his brain by Sean Michaels Guardian.co.uk link
The Los Angeles coroner’s office is waiting to run tests on the King of Pop’s brain to help determine the cause of death

Finally from an AP report on Fox news, the word that prison officials have deemed Obama’s books ” ‘potentially detrimental to national security’ and rejected an inmate’s request to read them.” Not making it up…. link

Since 2000 I have subscribed to the New York Times. Before that I don’t believe it was available here in Holland. Last year, I decided I would try to go paperless and started reading the New York Times exclusively online (via Times Reader). At the same time, in order to keep  my subscriber status, I donated my hard copy to the local branch of the library where my wife works. The manager and I have had a difference of opinion about the importance of a library subscribing to the NYT. I think any library in the good old USA should have it for readers.

It turns out my wife’s boss was right. Very few people actually pick up the NYT there. Yesterday I called the New York Times and told them I wanted to switch from being a subscriber to just an online reader. Surprise, surprise, there was no way to easily do that. I had to cancel my subscription (I asked the library manager a week ago if she would mind if I unsubscribed and stopped donating the paper to the library. She didn’t mind.). Wait until that takes effect because any attempt to subscribe to the Times Reader detects that my email is aready being used for my current subscription and denies me the possibility of creating an account.

I did  tell the operator (picture a bored young person who could care less) the reason I was unsubscribing. When after unsubscribing me to the hard copies of the paper the operator transferred me to a second operator, the second operator admitted there was no set up to easily switch from hard copies to exclusive online subscription. Sheesh.

When this sort of thing happens, I am tempted to consider just not subscribing at all and getting my news like so many do free online. On the other hand I am committed to the idea of journalism and reporting as part of community, being informed and the democratic process. I just have reconciled the romantic in me that I no longer need to kill trees to read the news. Unfortunately, like the auto industry, US papers are stuck in the mind set that journalism is a newspaper.

All this talk about the cost and decline of newspapers is not about the paper. It’s about readership. So let’s see. When papers started scrambling to keep up with the entertainment info that passes for news on the tv and began cutting costs in the news gathering department, their readership declined.

Maybe this was not totally caused by the worsening of news coverage and reduction of staff and expertise in news rooms across the country, but it’s got to be related at this stage. And what pays for newspapers? Not the rapidly rising  cost of subscriptions. It’s the advertising. Which of course is based on the estimated number of readers. Which is declining.

It seems obvious to me that the idea of information dissemination is essential but not the idea of 20th century pieces of paper brought to your door. Here I am. Chomping at the bit to PAY for online stuff I could get free (at this point anyway) and there is no easy way for me to do it.

I actually haven’t made up my mind exactly what I’m going to do. Over and over, dinosaurs in my life stop me from connecting to information and music I am interested in and my reaction is…. okay…. maybe I don’t need what you are blocking me from. I can’t hear your music unless I scarf up 10 bucks to download it or purchase it (and 30 random seconds isn’t just enough folks). Hey. Maybe I’ll listen to someone who is making their stuff more available to listen to and then give them money.

I sometimes wonder if the people at the New York Times have ever heard of the best english language news gathering organization in the world, the BBC. Granted they are government funded, but the model of their news gathering and dissemination remains.

While I was waiting for my Mom in the pain clinic, I found myself arguing with an article in the new New Yorker. Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink) was reviewing Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price.

Now I haven’t read or even heard of the book he was reviewing. I avoid economists like the plague they are. But Gladwell sucked me in by describing recent hearings on Capital Hill that I listened to and kept thinking about.

Basically a newspaper publisher (James Moroney, Dallas Morning News) was explaining to congresspeople and incredulous listeners (me) how Amazon made a ridiculous offer to license his newspaper’s content to their (in my opinion very silly)  electronic book, Kindle. They basically wanted him to take only thirty per cent of the profits and allow them to utilize the content any way they wanted including republishing it on any portable device. Moroney, of course, did not bite and that’s why he was talking to Congress.

Gladwell mistakenly jumps from this anecdotal evidence to the conclusion that by refusing to take a bad deal from Amazon, Moroney was an example of an entrepreneur who refuses to face Chris Anderson’s concept of FREE as a radical new way to price.

I don’t think it’s FREE when you give your stuff to someone else to sell.

Gladwell goes on and misunderstands Stewart Brand’s famous maxim: “Information wants to be free.” I don’t think that Brand was pricing when he said that. He was observing that ideas benefit from liberal exchange and suffer from the walls that keep them bottled up and unusable.

This reminds me of when I was a grad student. We were supposed to do tons of research. Of course the copies of the  material was limited. I managed to get myself banned from the Music Office copy machine by insisting on making mutliple copies of all the information so that all of the students would have access to it. Silly me.

There are wonderfully ridiculous ideas in this article. I think it is an example of how dinosaurs are still in charge of life (heck probably always will be).  I especially like how he jumps from using the jazzy religious social justice phraseology of “abundance” to equating it (sleight of hand prose technique to follow) to WASTE. GOOD GRIEF!

Anderson cautions that this philosphy of embracing the Free involves moving from a “scarcity” mind-set to an “abundance” mind-set. Giving something away means a lot of it will be wast3ed. But because it costs almost nothing to make things, digitally, we can afford to be wasteful.

Hey. Nice sophistry, dude.

I don’t think that’s what the whole abundance idea is about. Of course I am silly church worker, but I think that abundance goes hand in hand with careful utilization of resources and sharing.

Read in Bernstein’s “The Unanswered Question” Harvard lectures this morning while exercising. I guess it’s interesting that he is using Noam Chomsky’s linguistic stuff to talk about music.

I think I got a handle on the 13th chords in Antonio Carolos Jobim’s “Wave.” I looked them up in several places and finally they started coming natural to me.

Jordan and I kicked some serious ass yesterday at church (musically speaking). Of course none of the degreed musicians were there but what the hell. The Jobim piece came off well. It took Jordan a couple of choruses to loosen up. He was just hitting his stride toward the end of the piece. The Milhaud went very well I thought. I’m afraid I have influenced Jordan’s interp on this one quite a bit. He started out wanting it to go faster than I could play it. He ended up satisfied (I think) with me finding a groove he could play with.

Anyway, what with the usual congregational singing, Jordan, Theresa the flute player, Professor Dave on Bass and Dave the stockbroker on guitar, it was a pretty musicalSunday I thought.

My composer group meets Friday so I want to finish up the silly little setting I have been working on for this group.

I have a gig coming up with Nate the bass player. We accepted the gig knowing that Jordan couldn’t play. Bah. This would be more fun with him. I have been working over my own tunes. Re-arranging  them. Thinking about recording soon. These tunes are quite the ticket for this gig. I have theme for Peter Gunn ready and even the theme from Perry Mason. Not sure if we should do these or not.

This is supposed to be sort of a jazz gig. We are warming up for the “what-nots.” I wonder if these are their CDs?

I have though of doing some tunes like “Ruby my dear.” Also maybe improvising on themes from John Adams’s “Phrygian Gates.” That piece is too long anyway.

I picked out hymns for the next three weeks at church. My boss hops on a plane soon to go to Annaheim for the national convention of the Episcopal church.

I now have a full set of committed parishioners to do the movement I chose from Bach’s BWV 84.  Now I have to finish preparing scores beginning with the violin score.

I am hoping to do my Mom’s medicaid application today. And then try to get it in the mail (and in the lawyer’s hands) on Tuesday. We’ll see. This keeps falling to the back burner.

Speaking of burners, I have been doing a bit more cooking lately.

Made a pie for the new neighbors. That sort of thing. Re-organized the kitchen a bit yesterday just for the heck of it. I still want to completely re-arrange and organize my house. But it’s such a big job and I have tons and tons of other people’s stuff everywhere. My goal is to sort, discard and put stuff in easily accessible places. Hah.

Eileen just went out to pick more raspberries. I worked on Bach’s Italian Concerto first movement this morning. Life is good.

So I started out all gung-ho to tweak my present blog set-up this morning even though I plan to totally revamp it sometime soon. But I was instantly stumped by WordPress’s templates. Bah. Oh well. I wanted to add a line to the top of the site that defines me a bit more. Something like “musing of a composer and lover of words.” And I will change it eventually. But today I don’t have the patience.

Instead I am doing some straightening of my much more sloppier than usual house.

I was in the mood for Charles Ives. Then I discovered I hadn’t ripped any of my orchestral CDs of his. Then I discovered I couldn’t find the CDs. Damn Damn. So I threw on a Simon Rattle Cd and was delighted that the first track was “La création du monde.” Recently I was scowering my recorded music collection and couldn’t find any Milhaud. Cool. Jordan and I are playing a movement from his Scaramouce on Sunday. I quite like this suite and am interested in hearing and studying more Milhaud.

Maybe I will avail myself of the many online listening places so I can hear some orchestral Ives today. Or maybe I will find the CDs straightening the living room. Very possible.

Anyway, happy fourth!