I found this on Boing Boing. I love the internet.

I woke up with a sneezing fit (remnants of my recent cold) so I came downstairs in order not to disturb my lovely wife’s sleep. 

I don’t have much to write about today. Or rather I’m not feeling much like blogging.

Yesterday was a prety good day. The high point was getting a phone call from the DC daughter (soon to be the NYC daughter). It is such a pleasure to have grown up kids. I recommend it to all.

Other fun parts of the day include taking a cell phone call from my parents’ lawyer in the middle of a chat with Jonathon.  I was feeling frisky and the lawyer is a former choir member, so when I saw his name on the I.D. I answered and said in a goofy low sexy voice: 

“Heellllooooo.”

Pause. I don’t think he knew how to respond. His spluttering thereafter sounded like he thought he had the wrong number. When he determined that he was indeed talking to Steve Jenkins, he asked me if I always answered the phone with a sultry voice. I told him only if I knew it was him. Heh. 

I did spend an inordinate amount of time on the cell with the lawyer and bankers yesterday.

Still trying to clear up details on my parents assets and medicaid application.  Supposedly all my leg work for this stage of the process is done. I’m going to call the lawyer (deep voice ready) today at noon to verify that. 

I had a nice productive chat with Jonathan yesterday. We are strategizing about the upcoming gig. He allowed me to add my recent composition, “One Page Essay: from Brahms to Satie” (pdf) to the beginning of the set list. We are mostly in a trimming mode. But still trying to fully utilize the talents of the other two players (Kevin the drummer and Jordan the sax player extraordinaire). We decided to ask the drummer to do a four minute solo toward the end of the evening to allow him to do whatever he wants. We came up with this after Jonathon mentioned that whenever he has played with Kevin he spontaneously offers to do a drum solo at some point in the evening. I responded, let’s put it in the list.

We dropped “They just got married” by Randy Newman. Good tune but it had to go. We abbreviated “Under the Sea” and added a surprise trombone solo by Jonathan. We also rehearsed this. Fun stuff. 

Jordan the sax guy has proposed a funky tune called “Chromazone” by Mike Stern. Very cool tune. Kevin pointed out that the Youtube version linked above was made when he was one year old. I told him “At least you were alive.” So if he was one in 1990, I guess that makes him 20 years old. Tut tut tut. Young people today.

Anyway, Jordan sent me the chart (jazz for sheet music, heh) and I worked on the bass line that begins the video. I think I just about have it down. It will require continual practice to play well in public. We might not have it together for this gig. But hopefully this talented group of musicians will play with me again. Soon.

My boss read the staff another Friedman Fable.

Friedman continues to guide me from the grave.  I spent a bit of time talking to Jonathan yesterday about family systems.  (A quick definition of this concept is that when considering functioning the smallest unit of consideration is never one person but two or more usually more).  I found Friedman’s rope fable online this morning. My boss recently read this one to the staff to help introduce to them to a more healthy discussion of boundary issues and grown up behavior in church leaders.  Plus she had a presenter come and do an open session on family systems. The staff seems quite taken with it which is a good omen for better function in the future. In my opinion anyway.

I like the picture below. Found it on Oysterism also via Boing Boing. I love the internets. 

I am gingerly keyboarding with two bandaged fingers. Around this time of year my fingers sometimes get very dry and cracked near the fingernail. Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon and evening in rehearsals (easily over six hours all told) and my fingers are sore and in bad shape. But my spirits are high.

The rehearsal with Jonathan and Kevin went splendidly.  Kevin is a fluent percusionist and a bit younger than Jonathan. Jonathan and I attempted to integrate him as a full creative partner in our work. This entailed some unusual discussion and rehearsal. Kevin is interested in playing bass and drums at the same time so we did a lot of that yesterday. I can see that he will open up creatively in performance as well as rehearsal. At least that’s my expectation.

We actually managed to rehearse our entire set list of pieces we play together. Today Jonathan and I are meeting, probably to discuss yesterday, revamp the set list and maybe put together a little poster with the names of the four performers on it. 

I am thinking of adding my composition, “One Page Essay: from Brahms to Satie.” This a piano piece I wrote recently that begins in the style of Brahms and gradually changes to the style of Satie. At least that was my intention. Surprisingly when I showed it to Jonathan he seemed to like it. I was thinking it might be an  unusual way to begin the set at the coffee house.

The first act of the evening at the coffeeh house is a fiddler. An undisguised piano solo on an accoustic piano might set a bit of a different tone for the evening.

It would lead seamlessly into the introduction to the first song, “Frickin Trains.” I plan  to run it past Jonathan today. I still am planning to perform movement two of the highly abstract, “”Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus” by Olivier Messiaen. 

Yesterday when I was practicing movement one of this work, I was looking hard at one of the several 11 note chords (ahem… get it? 11 notes… ten fingers?). This particular one I find difficult to play. But I noticed it is written in two different ways in the piece. It looks like a typo. In one of the ways, the lowest note is played slightly before the rest of the chord. This is easier to negotiate than trying to simultaneously play all eleven notes precisely at the same time (as the other notation indicates). 

It’s actually a bit of a mundane question. I emailed one of the pianists I know at the local college and asked him if he knew the work and if he had an opinion.

In the meantime I was doing some research (while sitting in my mom’s shrink’s office yesterday. I do love the tubes of the internets), and discovered that further on in this piece Messiaen “paraphrases” this movement. Movement one is supposed to be the ”Gaze of the Father.”

“Avec Amour” as Messiaen puts it. If you don’t know this work, it is a gentle hovering piece in F#major that can be surprise in its beauty and tenderness. Later in movment 5 which is called “REGARD DU FILS SUR LE FILS (The Contemplation of the Son upon the Son)” He elaborates on the music of the earlier movement. It is a blow by blow expansion. When it reaches the point of the chord in question, he does it the easy way. Heh. I think it’s a misprint.

On the parent front, the lawyer seems to be in a bit of tizzy. I had a funny email from him yesterday which he sent before completing. Hmmm. Anyway, I have to run down some more paperwork for him to submit to Medicaid. Apparently they have given us an extension to the 9th day of this month to append our very complicated (and previously erroneously filled out) application for Dad’s medicaid assistance. Of course my lawyer only informed me of this deadline yesterday (that would be the third day of March).

O that reminds me.

I did a gotcha on my church staff a couple of weeks ago when we were scheduling today’s staff meeting. The staff is pretty intimidated by me, I think. I am a bit of presence phsycially with my erupting passion and intense affect.

Also some of them probably are intimidated by my Notre Dame degree (hah! Little do they know how sucky Notre Dame was in some of its stuff…. but actually not the liturgy part). So when I solemnly said to them… “O right. We’ll be meeting on the day of the great command. You all know that date? Right?”

Embarrased pause as they look at me. I wait a beat and say in my best Mr Peabody voice:
“You know…..

March Forth.” Heh.

Dear Diary,

or should I say Dear Website,

I wish I had a little more time to devote to your design and upkeep. This template provided by WordPress is pretty restrictive and seems to regularly go down and require some advanced problem solving to get back up again.

I liked it more when I designed you from scratch myself. But of course I couldn’t figure out a way for people to leave comments. And since conversation on the web about ideas and music and art is one of the main things that atttracts me to it, I converted to the silly WordPress template.

For a while there I managed to have my music (both recordings and sheet music) online for people to share if they so desire. I think of it as cyber busking. 

But the last time WordPress locked me out of my own web site, I neglected to restore all of that. The files are still sitting on my server. It’s just that I have my hands full these days and haven’t taken the time to restore a sort of definitive list of my compositions and recordings. 

Ah well. 

Eileen has urged me to purchase my own copy of Dreamweaver so I could design you from the bottom up. But I just googled Dreamweaver and it seems to cost over 300.00 which is what I suspected. I have been offerred bootleg copies of it, but so far haven’t succumbed. Even if I had it, it’s a big program and I suspect it would take quite a bit of effort to figure out how to design a new web site and get it up on this domain. Maybe I’ll find a share ware equivalent this summer and fix this up. I would like to put up more music, maybe even some videos and a tip jar. Hah.

Anyway, yesterday ended up a bit busy. I needed down time but filled up my day off anyway. I called over to the Cottage where Dad is living and asked if I came over to play the piano, the person who vacuums on Monday could give me an hour’s respite. They said to come around 1:30 PM.

Right after I hung up, my Mom called and said she needed to get out of the apartment. I told her she was welcome to come over to my house and watch me fill the dishwasher. So she did. I fed her some moussaka (which by the way was much improved by Eileen’s suggestion to bake it some more). 

Then I took her back to the apartment and went over to the cottage and played piano for the elders. I was a bit late. I take my electric piano because there is no instrument there so it takes me some time to load the equipment and then unload and set up. I played two movements from a wonderful piano sonata by Mozart I have been working on (Sonata in Bb, K. 333, 1778). Then some WWII (that’s World War Two not Wheee) songs. But when I ended with hymns was when I was a bit hit. One of the wives of the elders broke out her CRC hymnal and asked me to play a hymn. I even had people singing along which is always fun. 

It crossed my mind that some local religious people might think it hypocritical of me to play hymns when I myself am a non-believer by their terms and much too open to humans who aren’t in their clubs.  I have even had readers of this blog freak out and condemn me for my ideas and lack of morals while I am a leader in a local church. Inconceivable to them that there are other coherent points of view than their own, I guess. 

I do see the possible contradiction. But it makes sense to me from the point of view of comforting those who are afflicted. Even though I don’t agree with their religious ideas, I have nothing against moving the air molecules around in ways that bring a smile to the lips of someone who is dying.

Dad was a bit more alert yesterday after two nights of drugged sleep. He smiled and snoozed while I played. I know when his mental faculties were better he was not too keen on the hymns of the conservative Christian church. But he, like me, was raised on them and probably finds thems vaguely comforting because they are familiar.

I rushed home and made Chicken and Rice for Eileen’s supper. That’s what we call it. I just googled the ingredients and couldn’t come up with a more elegant name. Eileen learned it from some friends from Kuwait. Basically you cook the chicken in turmeric (I baked it). Then saute chopped onions and turmeric.  Toss in garbanzo beans and heat. Serve with white rice and simple tomato sauce (I used tomato paste and water). It’s an amazingly simple blend that has its own unique taste and texture. And it’s easy for the vegetarian (me) to skip the chicken and still have a tasty meal. 

I couldn’t find a recipe for this so I did it from memory. Apparently it was right. Eileen remembers eating with her friends on the floor with newspapers spread around. At least that’s how I remember her describing it. 

Today I have a long day. I meet with Jonathan this morning to strategize and practice for the March 13th gig. Then take Mom to her shrink. After that a rehearsal with Jonathan and Kevin the drummer. From there to Grand Haven for a high school musical pit orchestra coaching session with the director and the students. Life goes on.

I admit I was dreading church a bit yesterday. Recently  I attended a funeral that shredded the small bits of faith I have been mustering. Inanity always knocks me for a loop. As well as the way church communities do so little to welcome and accomodate people who don’t usually go to their church. (i.e. no printed programs, lack of clarity about what is expected of the congregation, strictly denominational hymns). It’s not that big a deal. It’s more that I sometimes wish I could just completely walk away from my church heritage and not have to think about these sorts of things.

Having said all that, yesterday went amazingly well. Most impressive was the way the choir seemed to rally themselves and really connect to the situation. I sometimes feel that choir is pretty low on people’s priorities. I try very hard not judge people’s commitments. My philosophy is to work with who is present. I think the “heart to heart” at last Thursday’s rehearsal started a good conversation and might have given some choristers some insights into why I lead the way I do. 

The anthem went surprisingly well. Several people noticed the organ music. This was encouraging because I had a bit of difficulty concentrating during the prelude because people were talking loudly right near the console. I must be showing my age when this sort of thing distracts me. Or at least showing my thin skin. Heh. The congregation sang so well I was able to drop out on two stanzas of a strong four part hymn. They continued on in four parts. That’s always cool.

I added a descant to the last hymn: (The Glory of these Forty Days sung to Erhalt uns). When I gave it to the sopranos one of them wondered if we could do descants during Lent. I said, why not? It was actually quite nice in the service.  The Buxtehude prelude and Gerald Near postlude were both based on the closing hymn. Even though I have performed the Near before, I felt like yesterday’s performance was actually quite musical. I guess practicing easy stuff pays off too. heh. 

Eileen spent an hour with Dad and Mom at the nursing home yesterday. I skipped it. Apparently Dad has not been sleeping to the satisfaction of the nurse. He has become increasingly uncooperative. Although when I saw him Saturday, he tried to skip using the walker but didn’t refuse when I tried to get him to use it. I am finding myself more worried about him. They gave him a sedative and the nurse thinks he’s depressed. She has a requested a psych eval which I think is a good thing, but wonder how you do that with someone who can’t speak or think well. 

It’s Dad’s vunerability that is getting to me. I’m a sucker for the weak. So even though I didn’t see him yesterday I had nightmares. Oy. 

I spent some of the afternoon making Vegetarian tMoussaka. I forgot that Eileen doesn’t like eggplant. But it didn’t turn out very well anyway. Dang eggplant didn’t cook through. Ah well, I do enjoy cooking. It’s more fun when I can share the food and it actually is edible. Heh. 

Today is a day off for me. I will try to relax, do some cooking and prep for the upcoming gig on March 13th. I would like to say this gig will be webcast but I’m not sure how to pull that off and also give the performing all the attention it needs.

I got up and sent an email to the fam about Dad’s continuing deterioration. I have been thinking a bit about aging and dementia and wanted to blog about it. Better to have family read it first in an email than here.

I recently read this in Anthony Burgess’s autobiography

On that first visit to both Berlins, I returned footsore from inspecting the free side of the Wall, peeping over and being jocularly threatened by armed official thugs, and went thirsty to a Bierstube called Der Moby Dick, with an inappropriate blue plastic whale in the window. I took a seat in the sun, but none of the young men who ran the place came to serve me. After half an hour I walked in and asked why. ‘Because,’ I was told, ‘you are of the generation that started the war. I went for a beer elsewhere.

Of course, at fifty I was old, and, to those young idealists of Der Moby Dick, I must have been of Hitler’s generation. There was no gradations of eld any more: fifty was as bad as ninety. Youth and age had become spatial concepts with a Berlin Wall between them.

from “You’ve Had Your Time” by Anthony Burgess

Burgess is writing about events that happened around 1967. He obviously was attuned to the changes in the culture around deifying youth.

Interestingly he mentions Mick Jagger (whom along with the rest of the band was considering appearing in an early movie rendition of Burgess’s novel, Clockwork Orange). Of Jagger he says how he admires “the intellligence if not the art, of this young man and considered that he looked the quintessence of delinquency.” High praise from an eld.

Later after telling about his wife awful death from cirrhosis, he observes

Works of fiction which present dissolution and death rarely show the outside world, and the trivial affairs which sustain it, going brutally on, perhaps rightly impatient with the snuffing out of the universe that a single obscure death represents.

That would be another way of viewing what is happening to Dad: that his universe has been diminished while the rest of us have to live in a bright unforgiving world that will brutally go on.

I have had very mixed feelings about my Father over the years. When I was in my twenties, I held him in my arms as he wept at his own inability to acccept me. This was the beginning of my true adolescence. He has adopted the usual male distance from me over the years. I mostly felt like our relationship had more to do with his relationships with his two brothers and his father. As usual, I felt like I was barely on his radar emotionally or even intellectually. Whoever he was relating to certainly wasn’t me, but I was comfortable with that. I loved him. But didn’t need to clarify who I was to him  constantly. 

Then when Parkinsons hit him, I wasn’t paying close attention.  In retrospect, both he and I could have anticipated how this part of his life would play out a bit better. But as I think over his misbehavior of the last few years, I wonder how much of it was as a result of the disease. Personality change is a symptom of Lewy Body disease (what he finally was diagnosed with). 

A couple of years ago when he threw a tantrum in my kitchen (also throwing his meds at me), at the time I just thought he was being his worst self. But maybe it was partially if not mostly his disease.

Family systems teaches me that it is difficult to differentiate ourselves from those we love. Hard to tell where we leave off and they begin. I use Friedman’s term, “globbing,” for this. I realize that in the last few years I have globbed big time to my parents. But I don’t really have any regrets about this. As I tell my Mom when she expresses misgivings about being a “burden” on me, these are my values: take care of those you love. It’s an old extended family deally and has not been part of my fam of origin, but somehow it has leaked into me.

Well anyway that’s the heavy thoughts from Steve today. Upward and onward to the usual pathology of church and church music. Heh. Today I play some easy Buxtehude for the prelude and easy Gerald Near (a living Episcopalian composer whom I quite like) for the postlude. The choir is singing a gorgeous canonic anthem by Robert Edward Smith. I am expecting people to do some serious acting out soon since I have started a very threatening conversation about change. Change in my role and change in the choir. One guy who told me last Sunday he was “sick of it” referring to some of his own discontent with my leadership was not at rehearsal Thursday.

This is tricky because when people don’t show, there is a world of possibilities including many completely understandable reasons they don’t make it.  I try to not jump to conclusions or as I said Thursday to the group to not set other people’s priorities for them.  Fuck it.  

“Street Anatomy obsessively covers the use of human anatomy in medicine, art, and design.”

This web site has a very cool point of view and finds very interesting stuff including an origami skeleton:

and Human Candles (casts of the artists lit for the exhibit)!

My March New Yorker came in the mail yesterday. Excellent short story by A. M. Homes, “Brother on Sunday.” bad poem by Leonard Cohen (I’m a fan of his but I didn’t like this poem) and the following poem which I quite like…..

 

WAITING AND FINDING

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tomtoms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

by Jack Gilbert in The New Yorker, 3/2/09 issue

Earth 911.com is a useful site. Just insert item and zip code and get info on all the local places you recycle stuff. It worked for Holland Michigan. Thanks to Pauldave for pointing me to this one. Good site

I’ve had a couple of very satisfying phone conversations with old church music colleagues in the last couple of days. I have a short list of people I know that I respect and admire AND are still accessible to me in the church music field. These include two men living in west Michigan named Nick and Peter. Both men are incredible talented and gentle good human beings (such rare combination of qualities). Peter mentioned the fact that he told one group of trained symphony chorus singers who were a bit disgruntled at his inclusive musical philosophy that “It’s music that makes people as much as people that make music.” Heh.

Jonathan and I also had our first rehearsal for the March 13th LemonJellos gig with drummer Kevin Dupree. I actually played with Kevin a few years back in a Holland High School musical pit orchestra. This is where I met my colleague,  Jordan VanHemert (whose sax recital was last night. woo hoo! Hope it went well Jordan! Kevin is looking forward to reuniting with you musically as am I!) Anyway, Jonathan brought Kevin into the picture and I didn’t remember him until I saw him yesterday. I instantly relaxed because I remembered he was a musician who could not only play but listen. So yesterday was a pleasure. 

I am still reading in Henry Alford’s witty and wise book, “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (while they are still on this earth). Last night this quote from Eric Neumann impressed me:

Neumann writing about the late quartets of Beethoven, the late self-portraits of Rembrandt, the late plays of Shakespeare, and the late paintings of Titian says “In these works of man a numinous world is manifested in which the polarity of outward and inward–nature and art–seems to be resolved… This art no longer relates either consciously or unconsciously to any historical time; the solitary monologue of these ‘extreme’ works is spoken, as it were, into the void…. It is no longer oriented toward the world or man… instead  the creative act which mysteriously creates form and life in nature as in the human psyche seems to have perceived itself and to shine forth with its own incandescence.” 

I know. I know. A bit heavy and word for these days of images and sped up mind functioning. But I still was struck by it. It reminded me of Denis Dutton’s lecture on evolutionary origins of aesthetic tastes on Edge 275. Dutton emphasizes the idea of pleasure in the arts in a way that makes sense.  One of Dutton’s credits is that he founded a web site I have had bookmarked literally for years: Arts and Letters Daily.

Plus another quote I really liked shows the range and balance of Alford’s interest in his topic:

In Edward Albee’s play, “Three Tall Women,” “Albee has claimed in interviews [that it is the middle woman who] is the wise one of the three because she has given up her illusions and is able to see into the past and future [represented by the other two characters in the play who are younger and older than her]. Or as she explains in the play, “Enough shit gone through to have a sense of the shit that’s ahead, but way past sitting and playing in it.”

 

I also watched and listened to the Denis Dutton lecture (mentioned and linked above) yesterday as I prepared scores for my afternoon rehearsal with Jonathan and Kevin. It seemed like the video was incomplete, but there is a transcription on the site as well which I plan to read. Recommended.

Using crayons as pixels is just one of Christian Fair‘s cool art ideas.

The Cohen Bros produced this video.

Ryohei Hase‘s work is pretty amazing:

Art Speigelman apparently has a new book coming out. This is a very cool promo:

The people above are apparently all in the movie project: Noisy People. I watched several videos on the site. Recommended.

I had a very constructive hour and a half conversation with my boss yesterday. I keep saying how much I like this woman and yesterday was more evidence of her skills as a leader. One of the things we discussed about my job was beginning a conversation with the choir about its current direction. So last night after about fifteen minutes of rehearsing Bach’s Crucifixus, I sat down with the choir and had a little heart to heart. 

I took them through my concerns. I think I did this in a pretty non-threatening way (for me anyway). People talked. I wrote some of their comments on a poster board as we talked. For the first time in my life I found a way to at least tell my choristers that one of my favorite choral techniques book is the “LIttle Red Hen.” Heh. 

So onward and upward. This afternoon I have a rehearsal scheduled with a new percussionist for my coffee house gig. He is recommended by my trusted friend Jonathon so I have high hopes that this will work out well. I sure do miss using drums in some of my songs.

While prep for my upcoming gig is going splendiferously, my church is gig is taking up a lot of my mental space. This is dire because I think my mental space is not that big due to old age and burn out from the church job.

I meet with my boss today and will probably discuss some of this with her. Basically I’m look at two issues: job creep and increasingly low commitment from singers. 

I mentioned the job creep to my boss last meeting. I seem to be taking on more and more duties for this gig.  These include increased meetings, weekly notes in the bulletin/service leaflet, and computer/internet resourcing. I have put some pressure on myself to perform more difficult organ music. This is satisfying but requires a lot of prep time. 

I also find that I feel anachronistic when I expect volunteers to actually come to rehearsals and actually come on time. I probably have shot myself in the foot here by not being more clear about my expectations of choir members.  The erratic commitment to rehearsals has drained me to the point that I find it difficult to bring the choir to the high level of performance I expect. Last night I had a full house (of course) for Ash Wed. I didn’t even notice if people came on time or not. They probably straggled in. Come to think of it, one tenor wandered by during the pregame and asked me if I had extra anthems. I told him I didn’t know. Maybe. 

I had one person volunteer to join the choir after my plea to the cong this post-Xmas. Also during this period attendance has sunk to all time lows. People seem to think nothing of making commitments to other stuff on rehearsal night. They’re job gets in the way. 

Also I invited the youth choir to sing with us on Holy Week. We are singing “Crucifixus” from the B minor Mass by Bach on Palm Sunday. The director emailed me that evening rehearsals would not work for any of her choristers but she would prep them. I could just add them on the Sunday morning.  This was probably the final blow.  I would not approach this piece this way with professional singers much less volunteers or young people. 

So I’m going to talk to the boss. Outcomes could include everything from dropping the choir to Steve quitting.  One outcome I can’t handle is no change.

I continue to be amazed at the relevance of the story of the little red hen to my life.

Do you remember it? The hen asks who will help her plant and harvest the wheat or do the work to prepare the cake from the wheat. Each time she asks the dog,the goose, the cat and the pig for help. She says, “Who will help me harvest the flour?” or “Who will help me bake the bread?” Then the other four animals reply one a time: “Not I.”

The only time they are interested in participating is when it comes time to eat the bread.

Of course, the little red hen will not allow them to have a slice. 

My philosophy as a musician is that your performances are only as good as your practice. This is especially true of groups like volunteer choirs.

I haven’t had the courage to read or bring up “The LIttle Red Hen” to the many choirs I have conducted over the year but I have to admit that the story does come to mind. 

I understand that at this time people in American society are running around with their heads cut off trying to do many many activities. In many people’s minds, being part of something means occasionally participating, whether this is their book club, their church or voting. They routinely skip meetings and come late and leave early due to their many other commitments.

But if you combine this prevalent notion of vague membership in communities with the idea that most community based organizations I have had contact with exhibit a weird predilection for the mediocre, sometimes it seems a bit futile to pursue any notion of quality.

Maybe I have difficulty with this because I am a musician who needs practice. I have known musicians who seem to do a pretty creditable job with little prep. Usually they are professionals and not exactly people you want to spend a lot of time with anyway. But on the other hand, many performances (especially by volunteer groups like church choirs) I have heard were painful for listeners. 

Okay maybe I’m just a bit grumpy because because I’m ill (slightly sore throat) and I received a discouraging email from another musician trying to weasel out of rehearsals. Yeah that’s probably it. 

Have a nice day.

The Distler organ trio sonata movement I had scheduled for the prelude yesterday went pretty well. Trio playing is an exercise in concentration for me.  I chose to end the choir pregame a bit early.  At the scheduled time to begin the pregame I had 3 or 4 singers. over the next fifteen minutes 5 or 6 more people wandered in. I felt like my musical efforts for the day would pay off a bit more if I gave myself a moment to collect my thoughts before performing the prelude.

Of course most of this struggle is in my own mind and probably represents some mild burnout I am experiencing. Even though the prelude and the postlude (a movement from Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes) qualified as actual organ repertoire, I can never be sure people notice much of what I am doing unless I get a direct comment. I do remember that as I began to play the Distler piece yesterday I experienced a sense of relief at doing something I thought was pretty excellent and had something to say musically.  Expecting people to notice might be a bit unrealistic, eh?  Heh. I do love Distler and Couperin so what the heck. 

And I am being a bit unfair because I’m pretty sure some of the people in the room with music degrees and/or a bit more experience and knowledge of music do notice.

It would be more fun if they were actually involved in the church music program but I understand how professionals probably need to just come to church and not be on the spot. 

Anyway, the Distler is the last in a series of difficult organ and piano pieces I have scheduled, learned and performed recently. I guess it’s time to give myself a bit of break at church as I start to prepare the set list for my upcoming LemonJellos gig (March 13th… be there…. be square). Yesterday afternoon I rehearsed several of the numbers I am trying to learn for this gig. 

I have to call my parents attorney and ask what to do about this month’s long term care bill ($7500) at Boersma cottage this week. Also what to do about the mistakes we (I) made around the application to medicaid. This will probably involve cashing my Dad’s IRA (which did not get into the final mix of assets reported to Medicaid… yikes!) and appending a new application to Medicaid. I am putting this off until tomorrow to give myself a bit of a day off today. I am kind of a wuss but I need some space.

This evening I have the usual rehearsal with the Grand Haven High school musical pit orchestra.

I do enjoy doing this. Of course I wonder if I’m going to have to drop out half way through if they don’t come up with half of my pay. I insisted on this when last year they took months and months to pay me after the gig.  Life’s little trials.

Very disturbing. 

For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.

“The Invisible War” by Bob Herbert NYT 2/21/09

Not only the incredible suffering of the victims, but also the impact on the community…. destroying social ties in an effort to win military advantage. Unspeakable.

Eileen booked air flights for us to California and England last night. I managed to exhaust myself with silly tasks so that by evening I was burying myself in Burgess’s “You’ve Had Your Time,” and Greenbaum’s “William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.” 

I did manage to get some organ practice in. This morning, I will perform the first movement of Distler’s organ trio sonata. I have been working at this piece for years so I am expecting it to go pretty well. I like the first movement of this piece a lot. It’s musical ideas are attractive and spectacularly logical in a surprising way (this is the way I respond to Distler in general anyway). I’ve also been working on William Bolcolm’s setting of “Motherless Child” which is devilishly difficult and dedicated to Marvin Gaye. My brother Mark pointed out to me Bolcolm’s irony in dedicating this piece to Marvin Gaye, since he was murdered by his father. 

I find the Bolcom settings a bit mischievous. I have purchased his collection, “Gospel Preludes,” in which “Motherless Child” is found. I wonder about the fact that Bolcom hails from that bastion of organ pedagogy U of M. Since he was chair of the composition department, it does occur to one to wonder what all of those fancy organ teachers thought of his work. His music seems very disconnected from the organ studios there for sure. I know my teacher at Notre Dame never mentioned his work even though this collection was published by the time I was in grad school. 

I think Bolcom successfully tweaks the organ world with these compositions.

They utilize difficult chords in difficult keys but still manage to sound quite listener friendly. I have enjoyed working on the one I have chosen but it’s going to be quite a while before it will be ready to air in public. And all of the settings in this opus seem to be similar in this respect. 

Bolcom also tweaks the staid professional church music world of the AGO by setting tunes normally considered trite by your standard AGO musician: “Just as I am,” “Abide with me,” “What a friend we have in Jesus,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Interestingly enough I have found myself more and more interested in the tunes of my childhood (of which these are representative). I think I am interested in American music in general and especially those styles which were ignored by my college training. 

On another note (sic), we are performing a little two part french baroque anthem this morning by a composer I have never heard of (Lallouette). I have also prepared a movement from Francois Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes for today’s postlude. I have had a bit of a jones for Couperin this week and have had to pull out my vinyl recordings of his “Concert Royaux.” Lovely stuff. I also have played through some of his keyboard work along with a big dose of Beethoven piano sonatas recently. 

I am feeling a tad desperate this morning thinking about how I will make it through this service at church. I have prepared a version of Hymn 123 to be placed in the bulletin after finding out that this charming little tune has a wrong note in it in the Hymnal. This fact was in the Hymnal Companion. “Alleluia Song of Gladness” is set to a 12th century melody. The accompaniment in the Hymnal 1982 is by the omnipresent composer Richard Proulx (He also did the arrangement of the Lallouette french composition we are singing today). I don’t like it at all. It’s just for handbells and percussion which I am sure is lovely when done with the right instruments. I on the other hand will accompany it either with folk ensemble or by myself on the organ. Either way I worked out an acceptable (to me) harmonization yesterday during my organ practice so that I can do it either with guitars or by myself on the organ.

My desperation mentioned above has little or nothing to do with the music I will perform.

It’s more about the people I will have to deal with. Due to my burnout I am finding the pathology of working with unhappy people a bit trying. Oy.

Two talking head types on “On the Media” were debating the “future” of newspapers. I keep hearing this kind of conversation.  Surely the concept of journalism is not dependent on its delivery system.  It’s fun to watch how people seem to stay stuck in a metaphor. 

The video above was linked on Boing Boing to a Jan NYT blog.  Another Boing Boing link was from Cory Doctorow (a writer and thinker I admire) to an article called Media-Morphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform, or Destroy Your Favorite Medium

I haven’t made all the way through it yet. I’m off to have breakfast with lovely wife.

I read a fascinating account in the Feb 23rd edition of the New Yorker Magazine of life next to the airport in one of the thirty slum villages there in Mumbai, India. Katherine Boo has written a piece called “Opening NIght” in which she juxtaposes the destitute life of a young boy named Sunil with the opening night of the new movie, “Slumdog Millionaire.” 

I tried to “furl” (or bookmark) this article online, but the New Yorker’s archive is set up like a very clunky pdf frame of pictures of the magazine. I’m sure that the powers at this magazine think they are both making their archive accessible and protecting their content by having such a clunky interface. Very dumb and annoying. This is a great (if not quite believable) story told from the point of view of Sunil. I recommend it to you, but don’t know how you’ll read it at this point unless you have a hard copy of the magazine or access to the New Yorker’s terrible online archive.

I say that the story is not quite believable not because it’s not credible but because it reads too much like subjective point of view fiction. But on the other hand, there are pictures of Sunil in the mag and also a pretty bad video on the New Yorker site that seems to make sense with the written acount. 

Due to the New Yorker’s silly idea about content, I momentarily considered scanning in the story. Then I realized that it will probably be available before too long anyway. I’ll try to remember to keep checking for it on other sites. 

In the meantime, here is a very ironic conclusion Boo draws about how the rich people of the world have a real stake in keeping information from the rest of us:

She writes:

“This frenzy of fence-building was not just an Indian thing. It was as global as the crisis in garbage. And it reflected uneasiness about a time that might or might not come in which information flowed so freely that, however little the rich wished to consider the details of the poor, the poor might fully consider the details of the rich. Not the fantasy contours of wealth long available on the television and on the billboards but the precise thing happening next door. The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”

So let me get this straight. This article in the New Yorker makes the point about the divisions between the haves and the have nots by telling an excellent story about Sunil’s daily life lived a ten minute walk from the internatinal terminal where hotels charge from two hundred to a thousand dollars a night. These hotels have extensive high walls and barbed wire-fences around them.

This article is copy protected online so that only people who can afford the subscription can have access to it. Apart from the incredible and devastating story that Katherine Boo is telling in this article, don’t you think it’s weird that the New Yorker keeps this very article behind it’s own cyber version of those high walls and barb wired-fences.

Man, I had a day yesterday.

I started out panicking that I hadn’t written the bulletin note for this weekend’s Sunday Eucharist. I skipped blogging and went right to work.

After that the day didn’t really let up for another breath. I practiced organ before breakfast, I then attended two exasperating church meetings, one before and one after lunch. Talked to both my banker and my lawyer about a major fuck up I made on the medicaid application (already submitted!) for my parents. Conferred with a staff person culminating over a year of attempting to be helpful to someone without alienating them with my intense personality (remind me never to open my mouth at church or better still take a badly needed vacation soon).

Got my Mom back and forth to see my Dad whose personality is rapidly disintegrating into sad shards.  

Had a rushed supper with my wife. Took a last minute phone call from the band director of the high school pit orchestra I am helping with. As I stood with my coat one talking to him on the phone, he canceled the upcoming evening rehearsal I was preparing to drive to.

This should have been a good thing. But I felt like this last minute schedule change left my nerves even more jangled.

Eileen hit the sack before too long. She was stressed because a friend of hers from work has only been given three more months to live.

I lay on the couch and finished reading “The Blind Man of Seville” which was quite good actually. I started another novel by Robert Wilson, “A Small Death in Lisbon.” Then went to bed and slept badly despite having no alcohol (If I have drinks, it usually disrupts my sleep…. last night I woke up at 2:30 thinking about all the stuff I had done yesterday and had trouble resting after that). 

Today I am planning to do more church work this morning: pick hymns and maybe try to get ahead on bulletin articles.

Jonathon Fegel is coming around 9:30  for a rehearsal for our upcoming coffee house gig. I have been working on a playlist for this and it is consisting of many more covers than usual. I am tired of playing my songs for people who have never heard them and maybe are only entertained by my eccentricities.

I meet with my boss this afternoon and I’m sure to get some feedback on how well I did with the silly church meetings yesterday.

Then choir rehearsal this evening.

I have to practice organ in there somewhere because I am playing “big kid” music this weekend: a movement from an organ trio by Hugo Distler.

All of my blog comments seem to have been deleted. Oops. I must have done this inadvertently. If you go back and miss your comment, I apologize.

Wow, my day off yesterday turned into a day of frantic activity, all stuff that I wanted to do in my spare time except for ending the day at the piano bench helping teach pit orchestra players notes and rhythms to the score of “Guys and Dolls.” This score turns out to be a bit difficult for high school players. 

Today I take my Mom to her shrink and then rehearse and chat with Jonathon Fegel. I also need to do some leg work for my Mom’s finances (call the lawyer and ask him about his recent email advice) and work on church stuff if I can get myself motivated.

I slept in until 7 AM this morning. I think my body was tired. I also think  I could use a small vacation, but maybe that’s just me. I had a nightmare last night about a huge black cloud with numerous huge lit (birthday?) candles hovering in the sky. I jumped into a red van (like I used to own) and could see a shadow of the cloud descending on the ground near the van. Then, I could feel the weight of the cloud which I began to think was a space ship of some sort searching for little old me. Anyway, I thought the space ship was going to crush the van with me in it. Terrified I rolled to the back of the van as it collapsed. I survived. Woke up a bit and the last part of the dream repeated itself vividly enough to qualify was a full rerun dream.  

I think I’m feeling a bit confined or crushed, eh?