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Tomorrow Eileen and I hop in the car and drive to Grayling Michigan.
1999
This is something we used to do almost every summer many years ago.
2007
Eileen’s family owns a hunting cabin right on the edge of public land there.
Interior. Probably in the 80s.
They were gracious enough to allow the Jenkins clan to gather there.
Ben and I making pasta at the cabin
Recently somehow it came up that we should do this again.
Mark and Elizabeth at the Hatch cabin
My brother’s family was very game.
Mark and Leigh Jenkins at the Hatch cabin
So he and his wife are driving from New Hampshire.
Emily and Ben at the Hatch Cabin
His daughter Emily and her husband are coming up from Ann Arbor as his son Ben and his partner Tony.
Leigh and Ben at the Hatch Cabin
My side of the fam is too scattered and busy to make this. But Eileen and I are planning to be there.
Chelsea, Eileen, Leigh and Elizabeth at the Hatch Cabin
It may be a kind of technological fast of sorts.
Paul and Eileen Jenkins at the Hatch Cabin
My niece Emily is bringing her hotspot internet connection. It’s not for sure that it will work way out in Grayling. If not, we will be without Internet for a week.
Leigh and Steve at the Hatch Cabin
I am looking forward to some relaxing and reading anyway. If I have access to the Internet it will be tempting to work. I have chosen a first draft of choral music through Lent 2013. I do almost all of this work at this stage online.
Also I checked out some online indices of hymnals this morning. As I read The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study by J. R. Mason, I regularly pull out copies of hymnals to check to see which historical hymns are actually in them. An index would be helpful if I don’t have the hymnal with me.
At this point I am tempted to drag along real copies of the current Episcopal Hymnal (1982) and my planning index I use by Carl Daw. Not sure this a great idea. But I’ll decide before we leave tomorrow.
I’m off to the farmer’s market this morning to pick up food stuff for the cabin retreat. Planning to buy basil, chevre, cheeses, fruit and veggies.
After prepping for my substitute yesterday at church (photocopying hymns… he likes to make a binder of a specific service) and practicing organ, I came home and went into a bit of a stall. I played a lot of Mendelssohn on the piano for some reason.
I am going to take my electric piano on retreat. I will definitely take Bach, Mendelssohn and some of my piano trio music to rehearse and play.
I need to wrap this up and do bills before I go to the market.
I went to my ear doctor yesterday. I have some hearing loss. Yesterday was a follow up to a prescription he gave me that I spray in my nose everyday. It has had the desired effect of moistening my nasal passages (too much information?).
Etymology: modern Latin, <Greek zeugma a yoking, <zeugmunai to yoke, related to zugon
A figure by which a single word is made to refer to two or more words in the sentence; esp. when properly applying in sense to only one of them, or applying to them in different senses; but formerly more widely, including, e.g., the use of the same predicate, without repetition, with two or more subjects; also sometimes applied to cases of irregular construction, in which the single word agrees grammatically with only one of the other words to which it refers (more properly called syllepsis n.).
1589 G. Puttenham Arte Eng. Poesie iii. xii. 136 But if it be to mo clauses then one, that some such word be supplied to perfit the congruitie or sence of them all, it is by the figure (Zeugma) we call him the (single supplie)..: as to say. Fellowes and friends and kinne forsooke me quite.
from the OED
I keep running across this word in J. R. Mason’s The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study. If I can just remember that it’s Greek for “yoking” I will be able to retain the meaning in my brain. Otherwise I guess I’ll just look it up when I forget.
My piano trio read entirely through the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s trio in A minor for the first time. It is quite a piece. While we were practicing the organ guy showed up and fixed the pedal board. I was then able to practice organ after the piano trio rehearsal.
I came home and finished reading Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq uses his story to make delicious irony. He, himself, is a character in it. The main character, Jed Martin, is an artist.
I like the way Houellebecq pushes this novel and the other novel of his I have read The Elementary Particles a little bit into the future. Thus he tells the entire life of Martin including his death. Martin takes an idea for making art and explores it, then discard it as an approach. He does this three times in the book.
The first period of his imaginary work uses Michelin maps. He becomes fascinated with the way they look. He photographs them and makes them his art. He is approached by the company and it is a very successful venture for both them and him.
Throughout this book, Houellebecq loves to mix up commercial and aesthetic ideas critiquing both but also blithely accepting them as the environment art is now made in.
The second period is one of painting portraits. Martin begins painting portraits of people doing their work, ordinary people at first. Then he begins painting famous people in poses that make a point. One of these paintings is of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates planning the future of technology.
These paintings are enormously successful and make Martin a wealthy artist.
He stops doing art for years.
His final period involves making intricate movies. Over a long period he films the greenery around his mansion. Then he films inanimate objects like cell phones and computers. Finally as an old man he puts photographs of the people he has known (people we recognize from the story in the book) on his yard and films them for long periods as they age.
Then he hires a software engineer to design a Photoshop like software that will enable to make layers in his videos.
The result is a video of photographs and tech pieces decaying into greenery.
There are other parts of the story including a little detour into a murder mystery complete with many chapters of getting to know the detectives which seems to mimic Simenon. Gratuitous nihilistic sex prevalent in his other novels is missing. But there are instances of violence. The murder itself is macabre.
Houellebecq pulls it all off. It makes me want to try one of his other novels. Or hope that he writes another one and it gets translated into English (These books are all written in French).
This man is 80 years old and seems to have had a very interesting life. But I think his stances on immigration and the birth certificate nonsense is deplorable.
I usually read Gail Collins. She can be witty. I liked this comment:
It’s so ironic, people. The national electorate is totally turned off by partisan standoffs. You can almost hear the public imploring, will you guys please just make some back-room deals? And, at that same moment, the Republican candidates are being pushed into being more and more intractable.
Spain like most of the Western world with the exception of the USA treats terrorism as criminal activity. That’s always made more sense to me than some sort of abstract nebulous “war.”
A recurring frustration dream I have is attempting to perform on weird and impossible to play instruments. I had one of these dreams last night. I was playing with a group of musicians. We were playing something with a driving rhythm. I thought if I switched to one of the other keyboards laying around in the dream I could help with this. I could even in the dream picture how I would drive the rhythm with a funky boogie left hand.
The first keyboard was smooth and I couldn’t tell wear one key began and the next left off.
Also on close examination, it had a very limited number of notes gathered to the left of complex controls.
Later in this dream I was playing a pipe organ.
The stops (the things one moves in order to choose ranks or sets of pipes) were like cheesy electric organ stops, plastic and lit from behind.
The keys themselves were also small, little plastic ones that were back lit.
I have spent my musical career playing inferior instruments.
This has been a choice on my part. First an economic one since I needed to take jobs that paid well and were located where I wanted to be located. Secondly, I have always realized that I wasn’t one of those musicians who would turn away from an instrument because its sounds were inferior. The quality of the sounds didn’t interest me as much how the structure of the music worked.
This probably is another way in which I differ from many classical organists. Classical organists are often very interested in, indeed preoccupied with, the wide spectrum of colors and quality in the pipes themselves.
I tend to think in concrete terms of registering (selecting the sounds) music instead of broader terms like most artistic organists.
No matter.
Yesterday I described for my student how satisfying I had found playing a Mason & Hamlin piano at the local Knickerbocker theater for ballet camp.
I was trying to get him to listen, listen and enjoy the sounds of the music he was attempting to render.
So I am not immune to the beauty of the sounds I make by any means. In my piano playing, I have confidence in my ability to produce a decent tone on an acoustic piano.
This comes from my brief stint of study with a very fine teacher at Ohio Wesleyan, Richard Strassburg.
He taught me how to develop a good sound. I also think that listening to recordings of pianists with good sound also had an effect on me. I remember admiring the pop pianist Peter Nero.
Of course he completely capitulated to recording goofy music for money. But I thought (and actually still think) his basic tone was pretty good.
I polished off the Epiphany section of my list of possible choral anthems for 2013. Today I plan to attack Lent. Using the interweb and a very good index I have been able to come up with some very interesting possibilities for the next choral year at church.
Unfortunately this work has used up my motivation to simultaneously clean out the future master bedroom the past few days.
Ah well. At least there is a path in the room now.
Since we are singing the lovely tune, “Schmucke dich,” Sunday, and I might not have working pedals (pace organ guy), I thought I would pull out Brahms’s lovely setting of this tune which doesn’t use pedals and schedule it for the prelude.
For the postlude, I have scheduled a big setting based on the closing hymn tune: “Fantasia on Ton-y-botel” by Richard Purvis.
The melody, Ton-y-botel
My taste for Purvis comes and goes. My teacher Ray Ferguson had me learn some of his settings. Ferguson said that Purvis was an important American organist and it behooved one to learn some of his music.
Richard Purvis, 1913-1994
Purvis’s harmonies seem to be under the influence of a sort of theater organ or jazz language.
I remember in the 80s struggling with deciding whether to schedule some his music one Christmas at the little Roman Catholic church I was working at in Trenton Michigan. The janitor was an irascible type who freely gave opinions. I asked him what he thought of the music I was playing. He said that it sounded like roller rink music.
Played on the awful organ in the terrible room, he had a point.
I’m hoping it will sound less like that when I do it Sunday with pipes. I’m also hoping that the organ will be fixed. Otherwise I will have to improvise something at the piano.
In addition to my morning dose of reading histories of Hymnody and of Christianity, I read a bit in Plato’s Phaedrus. It seems that this Socratic dialogue is one in which Socrates disparages writing over oral rhetoric. Which strikes me as ironic, since Plato wrote it.
As I read it from that point of view, some early mentioning of books and scrolls in the dialogue become significant. Phaedrus is induced by Socrates to read the scroll he has of Lysias’s learned exposition about lover and non-lover.
I looked for my real copy of Plato this morning and couldn’t find it. Thank goodness for the internet. I was easily able to find Jowett’s translation (linked above).
Socrates?
Today I want to look at another four weeks of possible choral music for my choirs. I am on January 2013. I intend to finish up the entire season. Then straighten the choir room and think harder about specifying which anthems to sing which Sunday in the next year.
Yesterday I dumped all my organ music from the boxes in which they had been sitting into some file cabinet drawers I emptied.
I did this because the committee to renovate the choir room decided to delay significant renovation (floor, painting) and asked me not to move my own file cabinets into the room at this point.
During the committee meeting I noticed that several drawers were either empty or didn’t have important stuff in them.
It didn’t take me long to do that.
I also ran down a book to take with me on vacation, Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears. I was charmed when his wife, Ruth Harris the historian, recommended his historical novel in an interview on Five Books on The Browser.
Ruth Harris, historian
Her description drew me in. After checking out Pears I found that he was a very interesting writer. He also has written some murder mysteries. Cool beans.
I haven’t read many historical novels. But I think Stone’s Fall looks fun. The narrative moves backward in time from 1909 to the 1860s and shows how WWI developed economically in London, Paris and Venice.
Reading in my Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, I discovered that Christians were made to wear yellow to distinguish them from Muslims in the the 9th century under Caliph Al-Mutawakkil in the Abbasid empire.
So that when Nazis (and Christians) insisted that Jews were yellow badges there were ironically replicating this persecution.
So if you’re following the news, you know that Aleppo is under great strain of war right now. Serendipitously , I ran across a reference to Aleppo in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years yesterday.
Here’s the reference for masochistic readers (Hi Sarah!)
The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of the Chalcedonian bishops. p. 253
I don’t know what I think about the gradual acceptance of hearsay evidence in trials. It seems like the forensic improvements (DNA) might help to alleviate the need for this questionable practice.
Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about how I find myself drawn in deeper and deeper into classical music and at the same time noticing how irrelevant to the larger community my own tastes and interests seem to be.
Last week I put hours and hours in preparation for the prelude that I played this past Sunday. I don’t think many people realize or notice the fact that I’m playing music on the organ, much less that I’m doing it well or not.
The music is simply irrelevant to them.
I’m reconciled to being anachronistic.
I am largely where I want to be right now. When I began studying composition in the 70s, I remember thinking that if I could just get enough piano technique to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, I would be satisfied.
I now have this technique and more.
And it is satisfying.
It’s a shame that not many people seem to want to listen to the wonderful music.
I found just rehearsing the piano part extremely satisfying. When I first picked up the work, I found the piano part pretty challenging. It was written for Nicholai Rubenstein. Dang Russians were often amazing pianists with huge hands.
Nickolai on the left, brother Anton on the right
Yesterday, it seemed a lot more doable. It is long and it was the first time I read all the way through the first movement.
Anyway, I think it’s a heckuva piece of music even though in my educational career, Tchaikovsky was barely mentioned, quite out of fashion even with the classical types.
I have to say that when my piano trio read through the first 20 or so pages of this, we all thought it was pretty cool.
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JUPE CONTINUES TO BRING TEARS OF BOREDOM TO THE FEW PEOPLE WHO READ THIS WITH HIS RECENT PREOCCUPATION WITH ALL THINGS HYMNIC
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Doing my morning reading on the history of hymnody, I got lost in Robin Leaver’s essay, “English Metrical Psalmody,” in Hymnal 1982 Companion, Volume one.
I was trying to straighten out the history of metrical psalmody in my brain, especially as it works itself out in Hymnal 1982.
I discovered another hymn tune in the Hymnal 1982 that is set by Bach in his Orgelbuchlein. I immediately updated my page of Orgelbuchlein Hymns in the Hymnal 1982.
It turns out the that famous chorale, O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde gross, was actually derived from a metrical psalm tune which predates it. Who knew?
The lengthy and involved setting of “Land of Rest” by Sowerby I played for yesterday’s prelude went well. I pretty much nailed it.
I had one little bad moment near the end where I neatly executed a difficult measure and screwed up the easy measure that followed.
This happens. It is as though one’s concentration is cemented well on the difficult section and then lapses in relief in another.
About a third of the way into the postlude, a key stuck in the pedalboard. Notes that suddenly begin sustaining themselves in a performance do happen. The trick is to determine (which continuing to play) in which set of pipes the culprit is to be found and then shut off that set.
Yesterday, the sticking note happened right after I thought something had fallen on the pedalboard.
I happened to glance down and notice that one note was continuing to stay depressed.
I shut off all the pipes connected to the pedal board. I finished the second section of the postlude playing the written manual part. My wits were sufficiently recovered by the last last section that I played the pedal part with my left hand and faked the rest of the piece with the right.
These things happen.
I came home and phoned the organ guy.
He promised to come Thursday or Friday of this week and repair the note.
I have six hymnals and 2 hymnal companions scattered on the dining room table. I have been looking up hymn sources as I read about them in Watson’s The English Hymn.
I feel kind of sheepish about obsessing about hymnody.
But having two generations of three hymnals enables me to observe trends in the use of historical hymnody.
The hymnals are American Episcopalian Hymnals 1940 and 1982, The English Hymnal 1906 and the New English Hymnal 1986, Hymns Ancient and Modern 1861 and its 1981 revision.
I am doing nothing more clever than looking up hymn writers and metrical psalm collections in the author index of each book.
Then turning to the hymn. I have the hymnal companions for the American Episcopalian Hymnals and they are a wealth of information (especially the multi-volume 1982 Companion).
So I read about a writer in Mason, then look him up and find out whether his hymns are in the old hymnals and whether they are retained or discarded in a newer. Occasionally an older hymn will only be used by the newer hymnal. This interests me because it shows that the newer hymnals were not only giving access to more modern work but actually opening up some unused historical pieces.
I feel like I’m exhibiting a somewhat obsessive morbid curiosity. But curiosity it is.
Eileen is going to help me with page turns for this morning’s prelude, “Prelude on ‘Land of Rest’ by Leo Sowerby.
As I usually do, I timed it. My first timing was over 10 minutes, the second almost 9 minutes. Yesterday it came in close to 8 minutes. The variable is that some sections in this very sectional piece I need to do a bit slower in order to play the notes more correctly.
Yesterday I only consciously slowed down the last section (of 15). This time it was more for expressive purposes than trying to get all the notes right.
I found that when I made the melody more prominent (mostly by closing the swell box on the accompaniment) I was able to play it correctly every time.
I think when I made the more interesting parts (the stuff that Sowerby added to the tune) louder sometimes my ear got lost in the complexity and I would change the melody a bit, occasionally ending a phrase in a tonal but incorrect way.
Bringing out the melody seemed to help this.
I have bit off a pretty big project by scheduling this piece. It’s long and there are canons in every section plus accompanying descants or harmonies. I practiced yesterday until I was too tired to continue. It will probably go okay today.
I spent a bit of time yesterday working on editing the recording of the church service where my friend Rhonda performed my “Little Recessional Dance.” The program (Audacity) kept freezing when I tried to save the file.
I probably need to upgrade the version I am using.
Also my computer (the desktop) is getting slower and slower. I should probably delete all programs that I’m not using and look at my register file and start up file. Sigh.
This morning I got up and cleaned the kitchen, filled the dishwasher and listened to “On The Media.”
I didn’t get to my project of cleaning out the side room yesterday. Maybe today. On Monday I meet with the committee planning the “renovation” of the choir room at church. Part of this “renovation” will be giving me permission to move some of my filing cabinets from home to work and fill them with my collection of organ music.
This is more motivation to continue cleaning out the side room.
*******************************************************************
My daughter Sarah Jenkins and her partner Matthew Locke were present at the opening ceremony.
I like this from the article above:
A quixotic exercise in self-branding, during which the then-Labour government thought to unite the country by coming up with what it called a British “statement of values,” devolved into near-farce a few years ago when the public greeted it with ridicule rather than enthusiasm. The Times of London mischievously sponsored a motto-writing contest; the winner was “No Motto Please, We’re British.”
It is no coincidence that some of the people least likely to have proper IDs to vote are the ones that generally vote Democratic and were strong supporters of Obama last election: young people, the poor and minorities.
My friend Rhonda has been very helpful to me as I considered entering my composition, “Little Recessional Dance,” into a compositional contest. One of her comments left me wondering. She mentioned that in the A theme the bass seems to “wander.”
I pondered what this might mean.
Thought about it, but didn’t come up with any changes.
Yesterday as I prepared the final copy to send off to the Greater Kansas City AGO, I noticed that the beginning of the A theme and its restatements were not the same.
In measure 1 (and 34) the bass went this way:
G, D, E, F#
But in the second part of the theme (ms. 9 & 42), it was different:
G, C, D, F#.
I had not consciously noticed this difference before.
I went back through my drafts and found that this inconsistency was present in the piece from the first draft I have of it.
I sat at the piano and listened to the harmonies and realized that the first measure version was superior to the other version.
I changed the bass in measures 9 & 42 to conform with it.
Rhonda is off concertizing in Germany. She and her husband have a dinner date with Eileen and me after she returns. If I haven’t heard from her by email by then, I will ask her.
At any rate, I think this change improved the piece.
I was a bit discouraged to read that the composition was to be from 5 to 10 minutes long. Mine is much shorter. This might eliminate any possibility of it being considered for the competition. Ah well. In my experience shorter is usually better for listening audiences these days.
I got up this morning and got bogged down in reading about the English Civil Wars and Oliver Cromwell.
I was looking to situate events in my head as a background for the history of Hymnody I am reading. The author assumes that the reader knows all about these wars. They impact the story so I thought I would get myself up to speed.
Cromwell was a lot more honorable than I thought he was. I guess I suspect Puritans in general anyway. The story outlined in the online Academic edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (thank you Hope College!) painted Cromwell as a brilliant and tolerant leader at a difficult time. This is much different than I thought of him.
I also didn’t quite understand that the three “Kingdoms” (Scotland, Ireland, Britain) were associated with three flavors of Christianity at the time: Puritan (Scotland), Roman Catholic (Ireland) and Church of England (Britain). This meant that Cromwell had natural sympathy with the Scots but not the Irish or the official Brit church.
A columnist I read regularly discusses the marginalization of classical music from a point of view I don’t hear so much in the USA, namely that it’s an expression of elitism. Here people are more likely to just simply be disinterested or even unaware.
My piano trio rehearsal yesterday was particularly rewarding musically. We rehearsed Mozart’s Bb Piano Trio, K. 502. It is a pleasure to have two fine musicians to play this music with.
This of course is not us. It’s the first movement I found on YouTube. We rehearsed it more slowly, but it was lots of fun. This is the movement we have been concentrating on. The entire trio strikes me as mature Mozart.
Page turns for the pianist are a problem. I have this movement in photocopies in order to help me with page turns. I notice in the above video the pianist has a page turner.
After that we read the next two movements.
This recording is about how slowly we read it through the first time. The second time we went a bit faster.
For what it’s worth, here’s the last movement. We played this much slower as we sight read it.
Today is the day I polish up my “Little Recessional Dance” and send it off to the Greater Kansas City American Guild of Organist, entering it in their Organ Composition Contest. The deadline is next Tuesday.
My friend Rhonda has comment that it’s not exactly a “little” Recessional Dance. But I think the title conveys the playfulness I feel about it.
I removed my name, changed "rhythmic" to "rhythmically" and added a third manual option for the submission version.
Rereading the application, I was encouraged by the “Definition of the Music Desired,” especially this phrase:
The goal is original new music of strong audience appeal and performer interest, playable by most organists, to become part of the standard repertoire.
This made me feel slightly less foolish for submitting a work that I think might be looked at as a bit goofy by conservative/more artistic type organ composers.
I am, of course, proud of my piece. I will put up an MP3 of Rhonda playing it as soon as I get the patience to upload an entire church service and cut and paste the postlude recording from it.
I need to stop blathering and get to work on preparing my manuscript for sending off today.
This is a hilarious legend I ran across reading MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.
MacCulloch dryly points out not only was the legend stolen from the Sanskrit original life of Buddha by a 9th century monk, “the two heroes became saints, with their own feast days, hymns and anthems. Small bony fragments of St. Josaphat acquired in the East by Venetian merchants can be seen in a church an Antwerp.”
Difficult to find bones of a saint that was an adaptation of a Buddhist story. Heh. I love this shit.
People who feel strongly about gun regulation (pro or con) sometimes close their eyes to the practical. This article seems pretty level headed to me when it suggests some measures that would possibly be acceptable to both sides of the argument.
The heat has let up a bit in Western Michigan this morning. It is quietly raining as the sun is beginning to gently light up the world here. I turned off all the ACs and opened windows to let the cool breeze blow through.
In addition to my morning reading, I analyzed the piece I am playing for the prelude Sunday, “Prelude on ‘Land of Rest'” by Leo Sowerby.
In this piece, I count 15 canons. A canon is like a very strict round (“Row, row, row your boat”). In Sowerby’s piece, he neatly exploits the canonic nature of the hymn melody. In addition he adds some pretty elegant accompaniments and counter melodies.
I quite like the one that begins in the soprano voice in ms. 29 above.
About half way through the piece, he starts doing canons every three beats instead of six. It’s pretty amazing that his original material effortlessly lends itself to this treatment. The climatic canon is a bare four part canon which is pretty interesting to do with two hands and two feet.
I spent another couple of hours on the piece yesterday. I think I have it pretty much registered (sounds chosen). I’m having problems figuring out page turns. This made more sense to me today when I discovered there are very few measures where canons are not happening. The trick with planning page turns is to find a moment when you can lift a hand from the keyboard. Not so easy when you’ve got two melodies going on.
I will probably corral someone to help with page turns Sunday.
I tangled with Spotify yesterday.
It kept telling me it couldn’t play specific tracks I was trying to listen to while it was in offline mode. The trouble is I wasn’t offline.
As I was doing this, I got an automatic email warning me my credit card on file with Spotify for the monthly charge was about to expire. I updated. No effect. I restarted my computer. No effect. I restarted it again. Then it worked. I love technology.
Yesterday I also finally went to the Farmers Market on a Wednesday morning this summer. I have been so busy that this has not been possible very much. I purchased heirloom tomatoes, chevre, and sweet cherries. Each person I bought from recognized me and chatted me up. I do like local.
Chevre is a mild goat cheese. Since the woman who wouldn’t let me play next to her stand (years ago) hasn’t been staffing the stall where they sell incredibly delicious local cheeses, I have felt better about stopping and purchasing their wares. I have used the chevre on toasted small slices of french bread topped with home made bruschetta. Ay yi yi.
My afternoon lesson canceled yesterday and I attacked the unbelievably messy side room we plan to convert into our bedroom for old age. Didn’t get much further than cleaning a corner and a path to the cluttered closet. But still, it was a beginning.
Today I have meeting with my excellent boss and a piano trio rehearsal. As my wife points out to me, my life is good. Extremely good.
When I choose music for the postlude and prelude, the first thing I do is look over the hymns for the service. When I worked for the Roman Catholics I thought that preludes based on hymn tunes helped people learn and remember tunes. I saw myself as introducing a certain repertoire to be used by my community.
Working in my present gig, I have found that hymnody is already entrenched in this particular community. So I don’t feel the same responsibility to seek out material based on the hymns in a service, but it’s still a good place to start. Other times I like to play some good standard organ rep (like Bach or Buxtehude or even the dang romantic organ composers).
This Sunday our opening hymn is “I come with joy to meet my Lord” sung to the tune, Land of Rest.
The sequence hymn is “My God, thy table now is spread” sung to Rockingham. The closing hymn is If thou but trust in God to guide thee sung to the fine German chorale: WER NUR DEN LIEBEN GOTT.
After a half hour or so at the organ bench yesterday, I had pretty much decided on a setting of Rockingham by Kenneth Leighton for the prelude. The postlude will be the fifth variation from William Albright’s interesting little composition “Chorale-Partita in an Old Style on “Wer nur den lieben Gott lasst walten”. According to the notes with the piece, Albright wrote it when he was 18 years old. It’s a solid example of baroque writing.
I was just gathering up my things to go, when I decided to read through Sowerby’s setting of Land of Rest. I had dismissed it because it’s a big piece and it’s long. Sowerby (like many composers) really needs a bigger organ than I have with more possibilities for sound colors. It sometimes takes some time and cleverness to register these larger pieces on 12 ranks.
Anyway, the more I played the Sowerby the more I was convinced that it was a vastly superior piece of writing to Leighton’s respectable setting of the melody for the sequence hymn.
Before I knew it, I had worked on it for a couple of hours and realized that I wanted to learn it and perform this weekend.
I often identify with the story of Jonah in the Bible. God called him to do something. He refused and ended up in the belly of a large fish.
When the fish spit him out, he was convinced that he should do what God asked which was prophecy to the city of Ninevah.
They ignored him. He was bitter.
Like Jonah, I keep finding myself sucked into futile tasks. In my case it seems to be the art of church music.
This morning I read a beautiful analysis of George Herbert’s poem (edited into a shorter hymn form) by J.R. Watson in his The English Hymn. Watson almost mournfully writes about hymnody. He realizes that it is a dying idea, but is nevertheless convincingly in love with it.
If you look at the footnote from Rosemond Tuve’s book, it mentions Melchisidec. This is a reference I never would have gotten with out reading about this.
I tucked photocopies of these pages into my Hymnal 1982 companion.
There’s no getting around it. Church music is on my mind. This morning I read a bit but quickly became distracted by the task I have given myself this morning. In addition to submitting the weekly music for the bulletin, I want to write an announcement to inform and encourage parishioners to join the choirs at Grace.
Recruitment is something I don’t feel very good at. This is complicated by the environment people live in and create for themselves these days. People are busy. Though they have more and more things to do with their time, they are more likely to wander in and out of things they have promised to attend regularly.
This complicates the discipline needed to learn and perform choral music. We have experimented at my church with cutting the weekly choir rehearsals and packing them around the Sunday morning service. I think this has failed. It has certainly not resulted in more members for the Chamber Choir nor has it helped my quest to make this ensemble an excellent one. It seems to have killed the kid’s choir but that remains to be seen. I have agreed to add the Kid’s choir to my duties with a small increase in salary.
So we are planning to return to Wednesday rehearsals this fall for both groups. I pointed out to planning committees the idea of piggy backing our ministries instead of competing for the same small group of volunteers.
The church (and my boss) seemed to have decided this is an idea worth trying. We start this fall.
Now I have to beat the bushes and see if I can get any response to the new set-up.
This morning I spent my relaxing and reading time writing this possible announcement for Sunday’s bulletin:
Opportunity knocks!
Why sing in a church choir?
We live in a time when the basic act of making excellent music (choral or otherwise) is rare in our daily lives. At the same time, new understandings of how our brains work are demonstrating that we are hard-wired for music and music making. When you or your child join a choir at Grace you have opportunities:
opportunities to deepen your faith opportunities to learn about the worship of the Episcopal church opportunities to learn to learn the arts of singing and music interpretation opportunities to discover great music first hand opportunities to experience musical ensemble under skilled leadership opportunities to serve Grace church with your unique gifts opportunities to lead Grace in sung prayer
These are gifts for a lifetime. Gifts that you can give and that you can receive. As you plan your fall schedule, please consider committing your time or your child’s time in this way as the Choral music ministry at Grace resumes this fall.
The Kid’s Choir reforming under the direction of our music director Steve Jenkins is going to be meeting on Wednesdays at 6:30 followed by the Chamber Choir at 7:30. Our first rehearsals are on Sept 5 to prepare to sing for Kick-Off Sunday on Sept 9. On the following Wednesday our rehearsals will be part of the multi-track Wednesday evenings (Believing, Being, Becoming) which will add a simultaneous track for learning and growing as a member of Grace.
Now is the time for you to listen carefully to God’s call to be even more connected to our unique, vibrant community.
Poor Eileen. She just got up and I regaled her with this silly announcement. The above reflects some of her criticisms and comments.
[Sheepish Caveat: I find myself engrossed in obscure reading and musing about hymnody this morning. Read on at your peril.]
I recently heard a preacher make a passing reference to a Beatles song in a sermon. The congregation quickly chuckled in recognition. The preacher had said that she was a “dreamer” and, “but I’m not the only one.”
I immediately recalled the meaning of “Imagine” by John Lennon (actually a solo piece by him and not a group effort). “Imagine there is no heaven…” and so on. It forcefully struck me how different the meaning of the song was from the context of a Christian sermon . I identify more with the musings of John Lennon than the gospel of contemporary Christianity. I remember that song as plea for honesty about being alive disguised as an exercise in one’s imagination “Imagine there’s no countries…. no religions too.”
It’s doubtful that these meanings were at forefront of either the preacher or the listeners yesterday. No matter.
Speaking of the Beatles, I often recall Father MacKenzie "writing a words to a sermon that no one will hear" thinking about the way people listen or do not do so to the music I make at church. Poor me, eh?
This morning I bogged down between the history of Hymnody I am reading and looking at hymnals in my collection.
I was reading about a pretty obscure hymn writer from the 16th century, George Wither.
His work was transitional in moving English hymnody further away from the then prevalant use of psalms in rhyme and meter (Metrical psalms).
This led me to wonder if this important but extremely out-of-fashion hymn writer had any hymns in the Hymnals I own.
I have two generations of important English Hymnals sitting on my shelves: the great “The English Hymnal” edited by one of my heroes, Ralph Vaughan Williams and its subsequent revision (copyrights in the front are from 1986-1999).
I purchased the latter on my first trip to England at Westminster Abbey’s gift shop in 2000.
I also have “Hymns Ancient and Modern” and its revision (purchased at the same time as The New English Hymnal).
I always think of Lord Peter Wimsey’s passing reference to having his “Hymns A & M” ready for morning church services.
Interestingly (to me) there are no hymns by George Wither in these volumes.
But, the editors of the 1982 American Episcopal Hymnal did include something by this historically important but probably not all that relevant hymn-writer.
In the manner of hymnal editors everywhere, they butchered the original conforming to their own needs.
Come, O come, our voices raise,
sounding God Almighty’s praise;
hither bring in one consent
heart, and voice, and instrument.
Alleluia!
Sound the trumpet, touch the lute,
let no tongue nor string be mute,
nor a voiceless creature found,
that hath neither note nor sound.
Alleluia!
Come ye all before his face,
in this chorus take your place;
and amid the mortal throng,
be you masters of the song.
Alleluia!
Let, in praise of God, the sound
run a never-ending round,
that our songs of praise may be
everlasting, as is he.
Alleluia!
So this huge wide orb we see
shall one choir, one temple be;
where in such a praiseful tone
we will sing what he hath done.
Alleluia!
Thus our song shall overclimb
all the bounds of space and time;
come, then, come, our voices raise,
sounding God Almighty’s praise.
Alleluia!
Words: George Wither (1588-1667), alt.
Hymnal 1982, # 430
A generall Invitation to praise God
1.
(1:1)Come, Oh come in pious Laies,
(2) Sound we God-Almighti’s praise.
(3) Hither bring in one Consent,
(4) Heart, and Voice, and Instrument.
Mufick adde of ev’ry kinde ;
(2.1a) Sound the Trump, the Cornet winde.
(1b) Strike the Violl, touch the Lute.
(2) Let nor Tongue, nor String be mute :
(3) Nor a Creature dumb be found,
(4) That hath either Voice or Sound.
2
Let those Things which do not live
In Still-Musik, praises give.
Lowly pipe, ye Wormes that creep.
On the Earth, or in the Deep
Loud-aloft, your Voices strain, Beasts, and Monsters of the Main. Birds, your warbling Treble sing. Clouds, your Peals of Thunders ring. Sun and Moon, exalted higher,
And bright Stars, augment this Quire.
3
(3:1) Come ye Sons of Humane-Race,
(2) In this Chorus take a place ;
(3) And, amid the mortall-Throng,
(4) Be you Masters of the Song. Angels, and supernall Powr’s,
Be the noblest Tenor yours.
(4:1) Let in praise of God, the sound
(2) Run a never-ending Round ;
(3) That our Song of praise may be
(4) Everlasting as is He.
4
From Earths vast and hollow wombe, Musicks deepest Base may come. Seas and Flouds, from shore to shoare,
Shall their Counter-Tenors roare.
To this Consort, ( when we sing ) Whistling Winds your Descants bring.
(6:1) That our song may over clime,
(2) All the Bounds of Place and Time.
And ascend from Sphere to Sphere,
To the great All-mightie’ s eare.
5
So, from Heaven, on Earth, he shall
Let his gracious Blessings fall:
(5:1) And this huge wide Orbe, we see
(2) Shall one Quire, one Temple be ;
(3) Where, in such a Praise, full Tone
(4) We will sing, what he hath done,
That the cursed Fiends below,
Shall thereat impatient grow.
(6:3) Then, oh Come, in pious Laies,
Sound we God-Almighties praife.
George Wither, Haleluia or, Britain’s second Remembrancer (London, 1641) from The Hymnal 1982 Companion: Volume Three B Hymns 395 to 720; Raymond F. Glover, ed. 1994, paraphrase of psalm 148
I have copied this carefully so that it shows how it has been bowdlerized by the editors of the Hymnal 1982 (or someone since the editors point out that this three stanza version also exists in Congregational Praise, 1951).
Having said that, I think the newer version is a good one while the original has a certain charm. I especially like the references to music and singers (Bass, Counter tenor, Descant in a Consort, verse 4.)
It took this obit to teach me how to say this guy’s name (COH burn). I have been reading him with alternating consternation and admiration for years. He was quite a character. I disagreed with him more often than I found his ideas useful. But what the heck.
I don’t have a lot of time to blog this morning before church since I got distracted by the candy shop of online resources via my staff status at Hope College.
I have been reading about metrical psalmody. I have been wondering about what is available online. I would be interested in looking at the texts of the early English psalters and comparing them to the other English translations of the time like the Geneva Bible.
I started poking around and decided to explore the Hope stuff online and bookmark the portals for future reference (this having nothing to do with the topic I was thinking about).
I have heard of the Nexis Lexis database but never buy real valium online used it. Hope links in for its staff and teachers. I couldn’t think of much more than, Wow! I have access to this powerful tool.
Then there’s Ebrary. A collection of online texts.
Amazing. I’m still getting up to speed on this one. I have used it in the past, but am had difficulty this morning getting the book I tried to pull up to work.
Besides many of the huge Oxford collection of information and texts I can also access online texts from its sister press, Cambridge.
The possibilities are drawing me away from blogging right now. Over and out.
I arrived at my 9 AM class yesterday to find out they didn’t need a pianist.
They had rescheduled a modern dance class. I have played for these. They aren’t nearly as interesting musically as I used to envision. Modern means (in the classes I have played for) other division of phrases than 8 measures. So one might have a six measure phrase or a three measure phrase. Rarely an odd number.
I had originally envisioned modern dance uses odd rhythmical divisions in the rhythm of the music instead of irregular phrase lengths. It most probably does in performance. But dance class is a different animal than performances emphasizing exercises called “combinations” which allow the development of small bits of technique.
Anyway I walked home and balanced my checkbook and paid bills. I was joining in a discussion on Facebook about Catholic hymn singing when I looked up and it was time to rush back for my second class of the day and the last class of the camp.
For some reason I felt mentally fatigued at this class. I managed to continue to make up music to fit the needs of the teacher. But I didn’t feel like I was coming up with musical material as good as usual.
This feeling seem to continue as the class went on. Near the end of the class I had that horrifying moment when the teacher uses dance lingo and I have no idea what she means. At first she murmured her instructions from across the floor in an aside. (This is the usual approach. An instructor will be concentrating primarily on her/his instructions to the students. Embedded in them, not necessarily verbalized, is the information I need to provide music for the exercise. A good rehearsal pianist is one that does not need directions but can intuit what is needed. Usually I can do this pretty well.)
At her murmuring (which my old deaf ears didn’t quite pick up) I did what I usually do and simply start up some music and let the teacher correct me if it’s not what is needed. She did not correct me. But later in between stopping and giving more information to the dancers and then restarting up the exercise, she came to the piano and requested that I play a “Coda.”
Yikes.
Here I am in the last few minutes of my work, exhausted mentally and physically. I know that she means something specific. But what? I did what I usually do when baffled in this situation. Instead of requesting an explanation (time is of the essence in this work) I asked her to sing what she needed. She did and I patterned my improvisation on her singing.
I continued to feel like my musical ideas were pretty crappy for the rest of the class. It was not a great way to end what was for me a pretty good week.
I came home and looked up “Coda” in my dance dictionary.
Here’s what it said.
Coda
(1) The finale of a classical ballet in which all the principal dancers appear separately or with their partners.
(2) The final dance of the classic pas de deux, pas de trois or pas de quatre.
from Technical Manual and Dictionary of Classical Ballet by Gail Grant. I found the same definition online here.
This is not extremely helpful, but I think I get the idea. What threw me off was of course that in music the word “Coda” has a slightly different meaning.
1. The closing few measures of a composition, usually not a part of the main theme groups of the standard form of a composition, but a finishing theme added to the end to give the composition closure; in sonata form, the coda is anything that occurs after the recapitulation. The coda is sometimes indicated with the notation of a “0” with two intersecting lines (as shown below). This is typically used in compositions that employ a da capo (D.C.) or dal segno (D.S.). Often the terms “D.S. al coda” or “D.C. al coda” are also used which indicate that the performer is to perform the coda portion of the composition after repeating to either the sign (D.S.) or to the beginning of the composition (D.C.).
2. Anything after the last entry of the theme or subject in a fugue.
With two classes left to do in the Ballet Camp, I have been pondering how differently I am perceiving some of the people this year.
First, the overall feel of the camp is much more relaxed and positive though there is no lowering of the standards of quality necessary to ballet.
A couple of the instructors seem very different to me this year. Where before in past years they were tense and driven, now they are relaxed and friendly. I see a couple instructors actually smiling with their eyes as well as their lips (all ballet people can smile, just not necessarily also with their eyes). This is a pleasant change. It could be that I am simply seeing the same people differently. But I do suspect that it’s not all my subjectivity and usual over sensitive interpretation of events.
This ballet camp has not taken the toll on my energy and health that I feared it might. At the beginning of the summer I was feeling very drained from my schedule of combined church work and ballet accompaniment. The contractor for the ballet camp caught me in a weak moment just before my California vacation and I accepted the work despite misgivings.
I came home from California less stressed than last year.
I do enjoy coming up with improvisations that fit ballet exercises and also have some musical merit in my own eyes. So even though the camp gave me a lot of work, it didn’t turn out to be so much that I am back where I was at the beginning of the summer.
In addition to this, I am finding my church work more and more meaningful as I double down on improving and honing my organ skills. Each week I look forward to preparing and performing at least one piece for Sunday morning.
This week I have enjoyed learning and delving into a setting by Ennis Fruhauf called “Intermezzo on Sicilian Mariners.”
This piece strikes me as very well written.
WARNING! MUSIC ANALYSIS FOLLOWS! DANGER! DANGER! WILL ROBINSON!
When I think of “intermezzi” I think of Brahms. I’m not sure if that’s what Fruhauf had in mind, but I still see a ton of skill in this setting.
Note the four measures marked Andantino above that follow a gentle introduction (not entirely shown). I think these measures are elegantly written. They are deceptively simple. But with repeated rehearsing I begin to hear some lovely subtlety, especially regarding the articulation, and melodic unity.
Then note how he proceeds with the melody in long note values developing the Andantino rhythm and tempo.
This returns in the restatement of this section with a duple descant.
I remember the first time I played through the piece thinking that the materials at the beginning were good but didn’t warrant an entire repetition. Then when he added the little descant, I was charmed.
In between, in the middle section, he changes key and does some clever stuff with the meter.
He sets up a very regular set of afterbeats in the lower voice with miniature lush chords floating over it on beats one and three. Then as a piece de resistance he delays the melody one beat. This works very nicely.
Two more days of ballet camp and then my time becomes my own again. This morning I had to spend most of my blogging time preparing information for my meeting today with Pastor Jen this morning.
She has mentioned that this fall might be a good time to begin chanting psalms in the liturgy. I wanted to show her the psalter resource that we are already subscribing to (St James Press). I printed up the psalm for this weekend and next so she can get an idea how these settings would work.
Unfortunately I now have little time before I have to eat and zip off to my first ballet class.
Here are the links I have been skipping posting the last few days. I’m limiting my comments on them to save time.
Even though one of my classes was canceled due to the rescheduling of classes in air conditioned studios, I found myself pretty exhausted at the end of the day, yesterday. It has been incredibly hot here and I did walk back and forth to Ballet from home in 110 degree heat.
Early in the day, I spent time at the organ choosing music for this Sunday. Our closing hymn is “Lord dismiss us with they blessing’ to the usual tune of SICILIAN MARINERS. I was surprised to find a pretty lovely Intermezzo based on this tune by Fruhauf in my library. I have looked at his work before and find it uneven in quality and sometimes lengthy. It will require a tad bit of rehearsal but I think it will be nice for Sunday.
For the postlude I landed on an obscure (at least to me) composer, John Garth. It’s in a copy of “The Organist’s Companion” edited by Wayne Leupold. I bought this copy of the mag (Vol 19, No 3, March 1997) used to see just what these were like. Not terribly good, but not too bad. I might purchase more if I find them cheap.
Anyway, according to the blurb in the mag, Garth was born in 1722 in Durham England and died in London in 1810. He “was active in County Durham and is known to have been an organist in Sedgefield.” There are a few more details on Wikipedia including the fact that he edited Marcello’s huge work on the Psalms.
The voluntary starts out with a pretty blah adagio (as English voluntaries do). The Allegro that follows is a charming two part dance that redeems the piece. It will make a good postlude even though everyone leaves as quickly as possible and talks and ignores the music much like the end of a movie.
I also received a box of used music I bought from Craig Cramer yesterday. It didn’t have too much exciting in it. I was disappointed in the 5 anthologies I bought edited by the great English dude, C.H. Trevor. I was hoping they would have some English gems in them. Instead it’s pretty much stuff I already own in better editions (e.g. Walther, Krebs, Guilmant).
I did get a book Organ Voluntaries by Matthew Locke (1621-1627). I purchased this primarily because I have a quasi-son-in-law with the same name.
Matthew LockeMatthew Locke
See a resemblance?
Also a very interesting book of piano pieces called “Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora.”
I do not recognize any of the composers even though they seem to be important mid 20th Century types. Florence B. Price was the first female African-American composer (according to the notes in the book).
There is a jazzy piece in this anthology by her called “Nimble Feet” from a larger work called Dances in the Canebrakes.
All of the music I have read through in this book so far has a popular jazz influence. Some of it looks dryer than that. I will use it to check out composers I haven’t heard of and see if I can find some interesting music that is new to me.
Have to quit. No links again today kids. I have more ballet classes filling up the day today.
and chatting online with my grandson in California.
Today I have a full day planned. Pick up the car from the Muffler Man parking lot before Eileen goes to work. Choose prelude and postlude for this Sunday. Then I plunge into four and half hours of ballet classes interrupted only by a lunch hour.
I’m enjoying Diarmaid McCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. He quickly gets through the first thousand in the first two chapters. He has some interesting insights into how Greek and Jewish history is necessary to the birth of Christianity.
Later in his chapter on Jesus, “A Crucified Messiah,” he explains the origin of the virgin birth of Christ:
“This tangle of preoccupations with Mary’s virginity centers on Matthew’s quotation from a Greek version of words of the prophet Isaiah in the Septuagint: ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel’. this alters or refines the meaning of isaiah’s orginal Hebrew: where the prophet had talked only of ‘a young woman’ conceiving and bearing a son, the Septuagint projected ‘young woman’ into the Greek word for ‘virgin’ (parthenos).” Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23
I looked in my standard Bible reference, The Complete Parallel Bible, which lines up four translations: New Revised Standard Version, Revised English Bible, New American Bible, and the New Jerusalem Bible. All of them translate Matthew’s use of the word, “virgin.” I assume that’s because it’s the word which was used in the original.
However in Isaiah, three of the four restore the phrase, “a young woman.” Two of these footnote that it was “virgin” in the Greek. One of them, the New American Bible, simple writes “virgin” with no footnote. The New American Bible was an authorized Roman Catholic translation last time I looked. Not sure what they are using now.
There is a lot of Catholic theology based on Mary’s virginity. I can see how an accurate translation might not help that.
I love McCulloch’s lens of language that he constantly uses. Here’s a lovey example of how the word Christianity blends a lot of history into one word.
“The name ‘Christian’ has a double remoteness from its Jewish roots. Surprisingly in view of its origins in the Greek eastern Mediterranean and amid the Semitic culture of Syria, the word has a distinctively Latin rather than Greek form, and yet it also points to the Jewish founder, not by his name, Joshua, but by that Greek translation of Messiah, Christos. With its Latin development of a Greek word summing up a Jewish life-story, this very name ‘Christian’ embodies a violent century which had set Rome against Jerusalem, and the world has resonated down nearly two thousand years, during which Christianity in turn has set itself against its surviving parent, Judaism. ‘Christian’ embodies the two languages which became the vehicle for talking about Christianity within the Roman Empire: Latin and Greek, the respective languages of Western Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy.”
This is probably more than any clear thinking reader wants to know about this stuff, but it’s what’s on my mind this morning.
That and the stifling heat which is already throbbing outside. Thank goodness for air conditioning.
Today I have the first day off I have had since coming back from California. Yesterday was particularly strenuous. After doing church, I came home and made lunch for my fam, then hugged my brother and his wife good-by and went played ballet classes for three hours. Whew.
Singing at church was a bit on the weak side. Many of the regular attendees that sing strongly were missing. Despite this, I was satisfied with the introduction of my new piece of service music, “Emmaus Fraction Anthem: The Disciples knew the lord Jesus.” I think it’s going to work fine but I want to hear how the boss thought it went from her perspective.
Still reading J.R. Watson’s The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study and by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.
Watson’s book is $99 new. The Kindle version is hilariously priced at $94. I’ll probably pick up a used copy if I decide to keep reading it. His take on Hymnody combines a conservative academic understanding with a current literary sensibility. His goal is to examine English Hymns technically and objectively in a poetic sense within the context of sung prayer. He is trying to avoid the approach that many church people use which is colored largely by their own devotion. I’m enjoying it.
McCulloch seems to approach history largely via language and words. I like that immensely. In my reading this morning I ran across these word facts.
from my notes:
Greek concepts imp to Christianity
polis – city state ecclessia – the assembly of citizens of the polis who met to make decisions
He relates polis to the words politics, police and polity.
Metro - mother
use of the word, ecclessia, in Christianity is similar to its Greek origins but expanded
a local representative group of a larger identity but also can be used to refer to the larger church and “lurking in the word” is the idea that the faithful themselves have a collective responsibility for decisions about the future of the polis
the greek word, kuriake, means belonging to the Lord (Kyrie)
from which church and kirk are descended
tension between the two concepts is a strain that runs through the history of Christianity – ecclessia of the people, versus kuriake of the authorities
kuriake must relate to Kyrie, eh?
I particularly like his comment on the word, metaphysical.
Aristotle “discussed abstract matters such as logic, meaning and causation in a series of texts which, being placed in his collected works after his treatise on physics, were given the functional label meta ta physica, ‘After The Physics’. And so the name of metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality, was born in an accident.”
His interpretation might be a bit dubious. When I consulted the OED, it suggested that an early understanding of meta ta physica was not that it literally followed the treatise on physics but that the teaching of it should come in that order.
