Large doses of Haydn seems to have lifted my meager spirits yesterday. I also had my weekly chat with my boss which always lifts my spirits as well.

Also listened to cuts from a vinyl Blue Note compilation of Chick Corea I recently purchased for 3 dollars.

I used to admire this man’s playing quite a bit but found his move from the piano to the synth and other electronic sounds not terribly interesting. I like the way his musical mind works and especially enjoyed the cuts: Ballad I and Toy room (recorded in 1970 with Dave Holland on Bass), and The Law of Falling and Catching Up (recorded in 1968 with Miroslav Vitous on Bass). He is on piano on these. I’m actually listening to them right now. I don’t understand how this music is all that significantly different from much of the 20th century classical tradition except maybe it’s improvisatory where classical is so locked into the confines of a performance tradition that requires exact reproduction of at least notes and rhythms if not interp.

I was thinking this yesterday as I went from listening to Andrew Russo’s wonderful recording of John Adams’ “Phyrgian Gates” to playing through it myself.  

“Phrygian Gates” when performed the way Russo does sounds wonderfully random and improvised in a rhythmic inspired way. Unfortunately everything in this piece is planned by the composer and executed faithfully by the performer. (That’s Russo on the right above. He reminds me a bit of Captain Hammer from Dr. Horrible, heh). It is a ton of work to do it well. I managed to pull together six or so pages (it runs to 60 pages) at the performance tempo with reasonably good interp yesterday just for the helluva it. 

I remember hearing my first live performance of minimalism. It was an organist in a nearby city performing his own work. It sounded improvised. I asked to see the score but he demured contributing to my suspicion that he just sat up there and doodled around on his own themes. Considering this particular musician I still suspect this. But considering the nature of the style, I also think that he may have notated the piece carefully like Adams.  (This composer was extremely protective of his scores in general so this adds to the plausibility that he may have been playing from a score.)

It is a ton of work for a random improvised effect. And ironic for me because I do so much improvising. But I find it is good discipline and rewarding to work out the notes to compositions by living composers. I once heard Adams describe this piece as a “virtuoso” piano piece. It doesn’t strike me that way save in endurance. I sometimes can’t tell what these academics actually have in mind when they open their mouths and talk about music.  But I’m pretty sure that’s just my own eccentric take. Anyway, it’s the only point of view I have, heh.

I listened to Aldo Ciccolini’s Piano Music of Erik Satie, Vol I on vinyl as well.  I find saturating my day with music helps me be a tad less insane.  That’s Ciccolini on the right above. I have been playing and studying Satie quite a bit. It is fascinating to me that he employees the language of the 20th century (quartal harmony and planing) in 1887. This contributes to the validity of his observation:

:Debussy’s aesthetic is symbolist in some of his works and impressionist in most. Please forgive me— for am I not a little bit responsible? That’s what people say. Here is the explanation. When I first met him …. he was full of Mussorgsky, and very conscientiously was seeking a path which he had difficulty in finding. In that respect I was much better off than he was, for my progress was not slowed down by any Prizes, whether from Rome or any other town since I don’t carry that sort of thing on me or on my back, because I’m a type rather like Adam (the “Paradise” Adam) who never won a prize—a lazy type, no doubt. At that time I was writing music for Le Fils des Etoiles on a text by Joseph Peladan, and I explained to Debussy the necessity for a Frenchman to free himself from the Wagnerian adventure which in no way corresponded to our national aspirations. And I told him that I was not anti-Wagner in any way but that we ought to have our own music— if possible without choucroute (sauerkraut). Why shouldn’t we make use of the methods employed by Claude Monet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc ….? Nothing simpler. Aren’t they just expressions? That would have been the origin of a new start which would have led to results which would be almost bound to be successful —and profitable too …. Who could have provided him with’ examples? Show him new discoveries? Point out to him the ground to be explored? Give him the benefit of one’s experience? Who? I don’t wish to answer, for I am no longer interested.’  

I found this on this web site. It cites Ornella Volta’s 1989 book: “Satie as Seen Throughy His Letters” as the source. Wow. I think I want to own that book. So many books, so little time.

Some years ago I purchased a 286 page collection of Erik Satie’s piano works. I have admired his compositions for years and realize there are many of them I do not know. Recently I have begun playing and studying my way through this book. The pieces are roughly in chronological order. There are many obscure and weird not to say tedious pieces. Satie wrote ritual music for the Rosicrucians.  I am marking down pieces of his that I did not know that interest me.

So far this includes his first and second Sarabande (1887) and “Le Fils des Etoiles” (1892). (Interesting web site here which goes into some detail about Satie as the first Modern.

I was watching Tom Milsom’s youtube video in which he outlines 20th century music without “Pausing, or umming or ahhing.” It reminded me that I have been studying Satie and that he has been a composer who continues to interest me in a different way than say Bach or Brahms or even Stravinsky or Boulez. 

If you like the above video, you might want to check out Milsom’s Indigo video.

I’m not sure what I think of it. He and his web site seem a bit slick to me. But definitely worth checking out.

I have also been reading “Breakdown: Portrait of the artist as a young %@*!” by Art Spiegelmann. Last night I didn’t feel like being away from my lovely wife who came home exhausted and drained, so I took Spiegelmann upstairs thinking I could probably read a comic with the tv going (I find prose difficult with the tv going). I was right.

This book is sort of interesting. If you miss zap comix you might want to check it out. It feels like an artist in search of material and form. It feels like Spiegelmann is devolving to me. Very old school R. Crumb stuff. Just my opinion of course. And Spiegelmann is definitely a virtuouso and shows it in this book. Wonderful integration of others’ styles as well as goofy experimental minimalism and weird repetition. 

When Eileen turned off the tv I returned to the novel I have been reading.

A first novel, “Captives,” was written by assistant professor of Hebrew language and literature at the University of Florida, Todd Hasak-Lowy. I would classify it as post-David Foster Wallace. It’s a bit less self-conscious than some of Wallace’s high jinx, but definitely wields the ol’ prose technique thingo. Last night I ran across a chapter that I thought didn’t work (which I’m considering re-reading), but so far it’s pretty interesting. It’s the story of a screenplay writer and has the interesting dual plot of his life (sort of boring and funny at times) and the plot of his screenplay (which is sort of adventure dark assassination acting out of anti-Bush administration and anti-societal creeps fantasy). I’m on page 228 of 381 at this writing and plan to finish the book.

I suspect myself of rambling to avoid discussing the sort of pit of despair I have fallen in for a few days.

Maybe “pit of despair” is too strong. Pit of ennui.

Better – pit of blank.

I experience my worst depression as a blankness.

A nothingness. I have been dipping in and out of it for days. Thank god for my wife and music. 

I cooked a bit last night.

Made weirdo little salmon tarts (for carnivore wife) and onion cheese tarts (for self).

Also a blueberry pie that took so long to bake that it’s still sitting on the table waiting to be eaten this morning. 

One of the things I liked about Gracyk’s Popular Music was reading ideas I have thought about (some for years). Here are three:

1. The many reasons all of us listen to music.

When I was in undergrad school (the 2nd time at Ohio Weslyan for a brief forray into majoring in composition), there was a teacher who would not allow students to do anything while the music was playing.

I saw him rip up a student’s paper she was writing on during a listening session in class. He was famous for not answering the door at his home until the piece of music he was playing on the record player (this was in the 70s) was over.  

He was attempting to teach us that we as musicians should only listen to music actively and with as much concentration as possible. A more laudable goal seems to me to teach us the ability to do this when called on. But I enjoy music in many ways: playing it, cooking to it, dancing (surreptitiously) to it, reading to it, working on my computer to it and just listening to it. 

Here’s a passage I copied out of Gracyk:

“Every experience is a candidate for aesthetic value. Music does not beccome aesthetic by moving it from functional situations to art settings — that merely changes the parameters of the experience that might be aesthetically valued. Suppose I sit still in a chair for twelve minutes while I listen intently to Sinead O’Connor’s 2002 recording of the ballad “Lord Baker.” Attending closely to the subtleties of her singing as she relates the redemptive story of love lost and regained, I am deeply moved. I appreciate the intense experience it offers. Suppose that I leave the compact disc in the changer and play it again while preparing dinner for my wife, who likes to sing along to this album. On nights when making dinner feels like a chore, the right music lightens the task. Although this second experience of O’Connor’s music is not as focused on the music, the music interacts with the other elements of the experience, infusing the environment with rhythms and expressive textures that it would otherwise lack. Circumstances might come together in a way that, when I reflect on the experience, I find that the confluence of music, chore, and my wife’s company is, experientially, the highlight of my day and of value for its own sake.”

2. Music as gesture

I have used this metaphor many times. Sometimes when I am trying to get musicians not to concentrate on their mistakes. I point out that dancers do not telegraph mistaken choreography. Instead they finish the gesture. In fact, ultimately, it is the gesture itself which is important, not the details. This is not to say that I don’t encourage accuracy. 

Also, I find more and more that understanding how to interpret a piece of music properly involves movement: the conducting gesture keeps the music organized physically. A performer ignores this at her/his peril. In hymn playing this can sometimes be thinking in two instead of four. In playing a Sarabande it might be seeking out the clearly emphasized second beat of this dance form and understanding how the music utilizes this dance gesture. 

Physicality seems to me to be very important to successful (live) music performance. 

Gracyck:

“Sounds can be gestures in either of two ways. There is physical gesture, and then there is gesture in the sense of something that is to be understood as conveyed through that gesture, as when one thrust out an arm to gesture toward something. Someone who focuses on the arm has not grasped the communicative act. We should not confuse the physical movement with the intentionality of the action, in this case the meaning of the gesture.”

 

3. The weirdness of listening to large formal structures in music

I have decided at this time of life, that though I can actively listen to structure in music, I tend not to enjoy it that way. Melody is way more important. Then probably comes harmonic structure. The structures that I have spent many hours learning and discerning in music are simply not the way I listen to music most of the time.

Again, in my music schooling this was constantly pointed out as a deficient way of listening. And I do think it is important to be able to hear these structures. It’s just that over and over I find my aha moments in music don’t necessarily relate to listening to it in this way. I get a rush when I understand the structure intellectually (usually with score in hand). But this is not the same feeling I have of loving music. 

It was gratifying that there are actually studies that show (contrary to the professors of my training) that most people (including the skilled musician) do not listen this way. Rather we focus on the “local coherence and coherent succession” in the music. 

I’m not saying that I believe this is the ultimate understanding and truth regarding this. Brahms himself was obviously quite taken with structure. I’m just saying that I am interested to know there are people studying the idea and even using the idea as a starting place for understanding how people actually listen.

Gracyk on listening to musical form (architecture) as you listen

“…[E]ven if one things people should listen for … unifying architecture, almost no one (if anyone) actually listens for it. Based on experimental studies, it is increasingly clear that listeners are relatively indifferent to music’s tonal unity and global organization. Even highly trained adult musicians attend to local coherence and coherent succesion rather than to any underlying architecture that unifies the music.”  

He cites Barbara Tillmann and Emmanuel Begand, “The Relative Importance of Local and Global Structures in Music Perceptions,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 no. 2 (2004) 211-22 

Read Daniel Clowes charming 2005 book, “ice Haven,” yesterday. He does a good job of telling a story with fragmented comic strips. Recommmended.

Also finished Gracyk’s “Listening to Music or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin.” An interesting attempt by the Department Chair and Prof of Philosophy at Minnesota State University Moorhead. I got up early this morning and typed up some notes so I can return this book to the library today. Gracyk seems to get a lot right about popular music. Where he fails is somehow connecting the reader to the aesthetic enjoyment of music of the past. He is caught in the silly academic false dichotomies of “my music is better than yours because I’m smarter and more educated.” Who cares? So I found him setting up straw dogs (as far as I’m concerned) about elite traditional music as superior. I think of Ellington’s comment, “If it sounds good, it is good.” This is as true of Bach, Led Zeppelin and traditional Flamenco music (I am listening to Flamenco music right now, heh).

I have been putting CDs onto my hard drive. This enables me to set up play lists. This morning I got up and made a Bach playlist to play while I took my shower. I have portable wireless speakers so I can take them where I want to. I really like having my music this accessible. One of my projects has been to organize the music in ways that I can find it on the hard drive For me this is mostly composers and rock/pop groups. I just follow the logic (?) of my own mind: Bach has a subdirectory and so does Arcade Fire. The important thing is I can find the music I am looking for. This is especially helpful when CDs have an array of music by different composers or bands. Now I can find them.

I seem to have nothing scheduled for today again.

This is unbelievable. I find that Monday is a day I sit around and am basically numb all day. I read. I practice. But mostly I just try to get my groove back. Usually don’t quite manage it all the way. A second day would be helpful. We’ll see.

I have been thinking about the March date at LemonJellos. I find it encouraging that the young owner of this establishment not only runs local live talent but actually asks me to come and play my compositions from time to time.

I am basically an isolated eccentric who doesn’t make much sense to many listeners or people who do music (family and blog readers excepted). It’s nice to be asked to play in March 2009. Not sure what I will do.  I do know I have been thinking of doing some writing of music lately. Just for my own sanity. We’ll see.

Speaking of encouraging, I see where Sir Monocle keeps on reading and commenting on my blog. Thank You! I read your blog practically every day and enjoy it.   Greetings from the blogosphere, dude!

Dear Diary,

Not so much to report today, but thought I should put an entry up anyway. Yesterday at church went pretty well. The congregation seemed a bit giddy. I suspect there were many happy Obama supporters in the crowd. One of the few places in Holland where this can be said. 

I played the prelude, “Let All Mortal Flesh” by Leo Sowerby, pretty well.

This piece timed out at 8 minutes this week so I started at 10:25. Eileen turned pages for me. I have been playing through this piece since before I took my first organ lesson. It was gratifying to do it well even though I had to ask the choir to quieten down a bit to begin and of course they started chatting again almost immediately. Such is the lot of the church organist at my church, I guess.

I did some last minute adjustment on our choral anthem, “Keep your lamps.” I asked the ladies to snap their fingers on beat three while the guys sang the melody by themselves. It had a good blend in rehearsal, but the blend kind of went to heck in performance. But still it sounded pretty good. We did the André Thomas arrangement. I listened to snippets of his recordings online (only provided the usual 30 sec excerpt). I thought he took it too slow and that his conga arrangement part was pretty dumb. I also omitted the forte piano at end, opting for a soft ending.  I was pretty happy with this performance.

Later at home, I listened to Blind Willie Johnson’s version of this which I quite like.

I played a Bach prelude as a postlude. After church, I had agreed to accompany a visiting singer who wanted to sing a song for her mom. It was another kind of gospelly thing. 

Then Eileen and I went and got food for lunch with the parents. Mom asked me to pay for it out of petty cash, which I did. 

I spent the rest of the day resting. I reheased a bit of Kyle Gann’s first Private Dance called Sexy.

I do like the fact that he makes so many of his compositions available on line. I was reading this morning about a piano piece by Jonathon Keren. Went on his website and found it very slick and promotional. No easy info on the piece. I googled it and found another composer on Myspace with the same name. I find it so weird that people guard their material so well that I can’t find out enough about it to know if I’m interested. I might end up buying the very interesting CD that contains this composition.

But it will be more about the fact that the pianist, David Greilsammer, has put together a very interesting and unusual group of pieces in sort of an album thing.

I also received an email from LemonJellos’ owner Matt Scott yesterday inviting me to play there in March. This is very encouraging. I checked my calendar and then said yes.

Today is an actual day off for me. I seem to be mentally a bit in shambles lately. I badly need this day to do nothing (compose, rehearse). I hope it works out that way.

Clicking in the early Sunday Morning.

First my Mom’s blog. She got in the car and drove around for the first time in a year. Way to go, Mom!

I decided that Paul and I could drive down [to] a Pub and Bar and have our lunch..as we were pulling out we had a little sleet..Paul said he thought that I should practice driving around the apartment building but I told him that I had [a] license and that I could drive…we really had delicious food 

Kyle Gann, composer extraordinaire asks:

How did the audience become the people from whom we composers are supposed to withhold our riches, rationing beauty out to them in only tiny drops?

I love WMFU’s web site:

 

14 consecutive versions of Sam Cooke’s (now blessedly outdated) anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come.” You can gohere to access the entire hour, or just click on each individual song (Mp3s below):

Sam Cooke  |  The Off-Set  |  Prince Buster |  Bettye Swann  |  Arcade Fire
Otis Redding  |  Bob Dylan |  Aloe Blacc |  Baby Huey & the Babysitters  |  The Gits
Ken Parker |  Gavin DeGraw  |  Aaron Neville  |  Aretha Franklin

 While you’re looking at WFMU, check out the Mitch Miller entry

Not only is this dude still alive according to the WFMU people, they link in to a full episode of sing along with complete with original commercials and Mitch Miller on an episode of Car 54 Where Are You as Fred Gwynne and Joe E. Ross audition for the show. These guys at WFMU rule!

Sequenza21 has a topic that interests me going. How software notation affects composing. Interestingly, a cursory examination of this discussion indicates that none of these people made the obvious comparison of musical notaton software to word processing. Hmmm.

The LA Times has a transcript and audio (with still video) of Barak Obama’s radio address yesterday. There seem to be some differences between the transcript and the audio. Weird.

The status is not quo! The world is a mess and I need to rule it.

Dr. Horrible

Thanks to Jeremy Daum for pointing this out. Click on the pic or look for it on hulu.com. I haven’t watched it all the way through yet. I’m saving it to do so with lovely wife.  It looks like fun.

Wiki says this about it:

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a 43-minute musical film produced exclusively for Internet distribution. It tells the story of Dr. Horrible, the aspiring supervillain alter ego of Billy; Captain Hammer, his nemesis; and Penny, their mutual love interest. The movie was written by writer/director Joss Whedon, his brothers Zack Whedon (a television writer) and Jed Whedon (a composer), and Jed’s fiancée, actress Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing team penned the musical during the WGA writers’ strike. The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike. On October 31, 2008, Time Magazine named it #15 in Time’s Top 50 Inventions of 2008.

While I’m at it, I might as well pass on this hilarious video version of Get Your War On that Jeremy also showed me. 

I like to read Donald Hall’s “Kicking the Leaves” around this time of year:

This year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.
Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,
remembering and therefore looking ahead, and building
the house of dying. I looked up into the maples
and found them, the vowels of bright desire.
I thought they had gone forever

 That’s just a bit of it. I remember first hearing him read it on the radio. It doesn’t seem to be quite as good as I remember it. But whothehell, toujours gai, archie, toujours gai.

I woke  up thing about the notion of Invisible people.

In 1911, G. K. Chesterton published a Father Brown short story called “The Invisible Man.” It uses the same notion as Ellison’s novel of the same name, the murderer is invisible because people just look past him (he is a postman). In 1897, H. G. Wells wrote the famous sci fi novel, “The Invisible Man.” In 1989, Roger Taylor wrote a song for Queen with the same title. It is closer to Ellison/Chesterton’s use of invisible:

I’m the invisible man I’m the invisible man
Incredible how you can see right through me …

Hah hah hah hello
Who goes there?
Hah hah hah OK
Who goes there?
Hah hah hah hello hello hello hello
Never had a real good friend – not a boy or a girl
No-one knows what I’ve been through – let my flag unfurl
So I make my mark from the edge of the world
From the edge of the world
From the edge of the world…

Now I’m on your track and I’m in your mind
And I’m on your back but don’t look behind
I’m your meanest thought I’m your darkest fear
But I’ll never get caught you can’t shake me shake me dear

I love the joy stick in the video. Those things were so phallic. 

I guess I relate to the invisibleness of people who are not seen by the people around them. In my environs people certainly notice me (I look a bit different than most Hollanders on the street). But at the same time I don’t think many people understand me or my work. whippy skippy. 

Life is still pretty good for this aging musician. I was looking at this passage in Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” this morning:

When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under fdr, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. p. 22-23

In truth, neither is the way people treat me in Holland. Again whippy skippy. It’s hard not to feel pretty good that the man who wrote those words is now getting ready to assume the leadership of our country. Good luck to him and us. 

Okay I didn’t blog yesterday. I think I was stil processing the election. I think I will be processing it for a bit. It’s a bittersweet time for those of us who support gay rights.

While we got our first african-american president elect, states keep pounding the nails into the gay issue with gay marriage banns passing in Florida and Arizona.  Arkansas has apparently banned all unmarried people from adopting children. And California looks bad as they are counting votes. As I have mentioned earlier, all of this hate is funded by some local West Michigan money. Hey praise the lord, right?

But the election of Obama is definitely something to think about.  Besides breaking the historic color barrier, I hope that he is indeed a post-boomer 21st century leader for the US because that’s what we need. I have felt the last eight years have been a frightening trip down the rabbit hole of the worst case scenarios of incompetence, weird nixonian payback, corruption, greed, and hate and torture in the name of the USA and a hateful Christian God. The Bush administration changed the basic fabric of our delicate attempt at democracy. I think they should be tried, convicted and incarerated.

Instead I’m sure they will begin the standard post-government “service” of raking in the big money. Pathetic. Dante would definitely put them in a low ring of hell. 

Jimmy Carter was right about the race thing. He said that he thought the USA had changed enough that it was possible Obama could be elected. I was hoping he was right about that. I was raised partly in Tennessee and I remember Jim Crow segregation. As a child it struck me as weird and unfair. I got in trouble for drinking at the “colored” drinking fountain.

I continue to review the bigotry I was inundated with in Greeneville Tennessee and other southern towns. This bigotry is also alive and well in the northern areas I have lived (including Holland Michigan). I see prejudice as part of the human condition. Hell, it’s in our language. So that we all struggle against our own bigotries and against the unfairnesses in our institutions and environments. How many times have I heard people say stupid bland hateful comments in my lifetime about people of color and gay people and women. Sometimes I have responded well. Many times I have been quiet in confusion and shame. Recently, I heard a man rail about how much the Democrats must hate women because of their treatment of Senator Clinton. He said that our own Governor Granholm was elected by Republican women who voted for her. Weirdly the subtext I heard in his rant was that he didn’t want Obama elected. Now why do you think that is? Hmmm. 

Well enough stream of conscious blogging. 

I have been reading “Listening to Popular Music Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin” by Theodore Gracyk. I have an unhealthy predisposition to read philosophy and aesthetics occasionally. Gracyk makes some great points about why we like the music we do and how we move from an initial response to a deeper response. He illustrates this with the scene in Wayne’s World, where Wayne, Garth and friends sing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  

He points to the characters’ obvious contagious attraction to the song as an example of liking something without understanding the entire piece. He goes  on to talk about the complexities of the actual song, “Bohemian Rhaposdy.” He makes a case for understanding it as a sort of Freddie Mercury comments on his coming out of the closet and grappling with the “crime” of his gayness. One point he makes is that the strong guitar and beat of the song illustrate musically that gay men can make strong agressive music that plays against stereotype.  He questions whether the movie scene would have worked if instead of announcing that “I think with go with a little ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ gentlemen,” Wayne had said, “Gentlemen, let’s go with some anthems of gay pride to get ourselves ready for the club scene.” Very funny. And makes a good point about how I find myself drawn into music to find deeper meanings. I often want to see a copy of the lyrics of a new song before I feel like I know if it works entirely for me. Seeing the score is even better for the composer in me. 

Well anyway, I leave you, dear reader, if you are still there with this interesting quote from John Dewey’s Art as Experience that Gracyk quotes:

“The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to percieve.”

Yesterday at church went very well musically.

Most of my choir came early so we could get started on our three pieces we needed to work on: “Beati” from the Taizé community, “Requiem” by Puccini and the complicated arrangement of the opening hymn, “For All the Saints” (choir only on 2 & 5, high voices on 6 and low on 7).

We rehearsed them in that order in the pregame.

I was especially happy with the performance of the Puccini. I developed a solid interpretation that involved lots of “La Boheme” like rubato. The choir seemed to favor the “pure vowells” I have been trying to teach them to produce for a few years. I thought it was a respectable rendition by a shrinking volunteer church choir. 

I improvised the introduction, interludes and much of the accompaniment to “For All the Saints.” Leo Sowerby has written a chorale prelude on this tune which cleverly emphasizes Vaughan Williams’s walking bass. I stole the idea from him and used it in my intro and some of the interludes. For once I was pretty satisfied with my improvisations. 

The “Beati” came off okay. It was probably our shakiest choral number but still it pulled together pretty accurately and the cong kept their little mantra going admirably. The best part of this was the silence before and after it. I mentioned this silence to the cong in my pregame congregational rehearsal. I do like silence in prayer.

We sang “Wade in the Water” as an a cappella baptismal hymn.  In retrospect, I maybe could have done more to make this sound a bit better with accompaniment or rehearsal with the choir. But you can’t do everything I guess. I do vary how I do my accompaniments and favor attempting a cappella when appropriate. I do think it’s almost always an option on the African American Spirituals (or sorrow songs as they are sometimes called). 

My postlude was a hoary old organ piece called “Grand Choeur” by Dubois. I don’t really have enough organ to register something like this, but it seemed called for so I did it. I played it pretty well. 

There was a newcomers’ brunch after service that I skipped. Eileen came back with me for the scheduled funeral. I performed Mozart piano sonatas as a prelude. This is something I do. I think Mozart’s joie de vivre tells us something about life and death. Just my opinion, but it seems to work. I repeated the morning prelude by Guillmant as communion music for the funeral. At the end, I try to do something a bit more uplifting for mourners as they leave. Yesterday I did an organ improv on the American tune, “Come away to the skies.” It seemed to work.

 Finished reading The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen. The plot is about an America just slightly more repressive than today’s America but along the same lines. The government and the corporations control the media and keep the public docile through lies and manipulation. There is a private security organization named Whitehall which is reminiscent of Erik Prince’s out-of-control private security organization, Blackwater.  The story is basically about a second revolution where America revolts against its government. There are are three or four main characters woodenly drawn. The plot is contrived and hard to believe. It’s disappointing because I am in sympathy with the point of view of this little piece of propaganda, but find myself reacting to it like a piece of poorly written young adult fiction. Lame.

Thank you to letter writer, George Jochnowitz, in last week’s NYT Book Review for including a poem in his letter:

To the Editor:

There is at least one case where an author uses a talking bird to make an important political statement. The great Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi (spelled Po Chû-i in the Wade Giles system of transcription), who lived from 772 to 846, wrote a poem about a cockatoo that was as gifted as any bird in literature. Here is the poem, translated by Arthur Waley:

Sent as a present from Annam—
A red cockatoo.
Colour’d like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.

Bai Juyi’s cockatoo is as relevant today as it was when the poem was written 12 centuries ago.

George Jochnowitz
New York

Only “learned and eloquent” by very lame and local standards, I still feel a bit like a red cockatoo here in Holland sometimes.

This feeling has been nagging at me lately. I am realizing how isolated I am artistically from breathing people around me. I am not waivering in my commitment to who I am. Nor am I feeling less connected to my dead musicians, my remote musicians (living now but connected to me primarily through the internet and articles and books and their own music).

Rather as I watch my father’s personality disintegrate before my eyes, I sometimes feel my own emotional defenses being stripped away, too. Even my own rationalizations ebb and I look brutally in the mirror and see someone who has failed to connect to other composers and musicians.

For one horrifying moment I almost went to the local AGO meeting last night. Actually if I wasn’t feeling so worn down, I think it would have been a good thing to at least keep sniffing up this alley of possible colleagues and bullshit partners.

My isolation locally is the result of many serendipitous events. When I first came to this area I reached out to local musicians. Some responded. These people are pretty much all gone at this point. The local college both snubbed and frightened me with its typical combination of smugness and lack of competence.  The generation of teachers who were here in Holland in the year of my arrival (1987) were very old school. They seemed to see Holland as sort of a Notre Dame of the Dutch Reformed Church.

For example, I was very interested in Erik Routley the hymnologist at the time of my arrival. At least one local teacher knew him.  I tried to talk to this teacher about Routley and found that the things about Routley I admired (his expertise in hymnody and dedication to quality in church music) seemed to repell this local dude. Also he seemed repelled by me.

Time and time again I experienced this group of musicians as incompetent, provincial and small minded. It wasn’t that big a deal. I had come to the area to serve as a full time musician for a local Roman Catholic community. I didn’t perceive that many of the Dutch Reformed people detested Catholics. Weird.

Anyway, there’s a new generation of teachers at the local college and once again I seemed to have failed to connect with them collegially. At least this time most of them are not so uptight about my eclectic aesthetic.

I persist in my composing and performing. I have never been good at self promotion or schmoozing. I think that my current situation would require some pretty fancy dancing in those areas to make progress.  On the other hand, I think it would have been good for me to go to the AGO last night, except that I am on the tail end of a 48 hour depression and couldn’t manage it. Ah well.

Ironically the music I am performing and conducting this morning at church (Guillmant, Puccini, Dubois) represents more of what I think of as the AGO aesthetic from the 80s – romantic, lush and sort of anti-renaissance and anti-baroque and definitely anti-popular music. I’m pretty sure this has changed. In the 90s I wrote a choral piece that was dependent on a bit of jazz-like rhythmic understandings (the accents tended to occur on the last third of the pulse) and was surprised when it won second prize in a Maryland AGO compositional contest. When I spoke on the phone with one of the judges I was surprised again that the dude seemed to understand my little composition. 

So it’s not a desert everywhere. Hell, it might not be one here, since I haven’t connected with this group in years. The leadership continues to be made up of people who seem to dislike me or find me somehow a bit uncomfortable to talk to.  

Maybe I’ll have the mental wherewithal to attend the next meeting.

Yesterday seemed very full for me.

I took my parents on a “color tour” ride so they could enjoy the beautiful colors of the changing leaves here in Western Michigan.

I played a CD of the Anonymous 4 singing American hymns as we drove around. (This is a great group and a fabulous Cd). My Dad mostly sat next to me with his eyes closed for the entire trip. He is definitely failing. I then dropped off my Mom at a used shop so she could shop, took Dad back to their apartment and then started a mad dash to prepare a clearer version of the opening hymn this Sunday for the choir. 

This entailed created an 8 page piece of sheet music which combined features of an anthem version of “For All the Saints” and the Hymnal 1982 version. This final version would eliminate the need for choir members to flip back and forth between their hymnals and a piece of sheet music during the opening procession this Sunday.  The arrangement was not new, just the idea of having everything in one place was new. 

I continued to work on this in between other tasks like taxiing Mom from the used shop to Walgreens and then home to the apartment. I also met with my boss for our weekly conference.

Today, I’m planning to take my Dad his lunch while Mom and Eileen go out for lunch. 

By the time rehearsal came around last night, I was drained and exhausted.  It was a pretty good rehearsal.   Mulling it over this morning, I do wonder about the effectiveness of my leadership style.  I think I shoot myself in the foot a bit by not acting the prima donna “rilly good” musician more. It’s just my style to try to quietly lead with content at a time when our society is mostly about perception.  

I’m probably not in a good space to do this kind of self analysis right now. Feeling a bit overwhelmed I guess. 

I got up early and emailed the choir members asking them to come fifteen minutes early this Sunday to the pregame rehearsal Sunday. Not sure if people will actually do this, but if they did it would  help our performance.  

Hopefully today I will be able to relax some. Eileen has the day off. I bought two pumpkins which I would like to make into jackolanterns. I usually do this for Halloween. We are stocked with candy for trick or treaters this evening. I enjoy giving out candy.

In this John Adams interview about his new autobiography, you find out the genesis of his piece, “Harmonliere.”  He compares Edward “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire” Gibbons’s sentences to Mozart. He mentions John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” as an example of a “40 minute exhalation of raw feeling.” 

 

What does “Doctor Atomic” say to us today?

I’m not sure what “Doctor Atomic” says. And maybe that’s a good thing. Because in composing this opera about the creation of the atomic bomb, I lived with the historical material, reading dozens of books, and talking to experts, and to this day I don’t know if it [dropping the bomb] was the correct thing to do. There are many people who think it was a profoundly morally wrong thing to drop that bomb. There are other people, including scientists who worked on the Los Alamos project, who say that we would have been facing the further death of a million people if we had to invade Japan. So these are imponderable things.

But people are lazy now. Particularly Americans are lazy. We want to receive all our information in sound bites and have somebody else do the thinking for us. When I was growing up, nuclear weapons were on our minds all the time. We were keenly aware of the possibility that the earth could simply blow up in a nuclear holocaust. And now it’s like a joke, like George Bush looking under the desk for those nuclear weapons. When people have written to me or come up to me and told me how deeply affected they were by attending “Doctor Atomic,” it’s because it not only made them think but it made them feel. 

 

He also mentions that the Met’s Peter Gelb has commissed Osvaldo Golijov to write a new opera.

This morning I couldn’t lay and listen to the radio in the dark anymore when it told me that two (TWO) local zillionaires are not satisfied with Michigan’s anti-gay constitutional amendment, they are funding anti-gay marriage ballot proposals in California (Elsa Prince Broekhuizen – $450,000 ) and Florida (Dick “Amway” De Vos – $100,00).

Broekhuizen is mother to Besty De Vos (Dick’s wife) and Erik Prince (the infamous head of Blackwater).  This is all so depressing and unspeakable.  These people are doing damage to our society. I protest.

Little old Holland was also on NPR yesterday morning. The early morning cutesy blurb (which I usually detest) was about how Holland’s blue law challenge vote is all goofed up. If you want booze on Sunday, you vote “no” (to discontinue the present law…. Shall it be continued? no.) If you’re against this sucker, you vote yes. NPR thought that was silly enough to use it as a cutsey moment. Thanks again, Holland.

I had a quiet day yesterday. I worked on my Bach arrangement I am doing a bit. Made pies (apple and blueberry). Did a lot of chatting with visiting brother, Mark. Practiced piano (mostly couperin and bach yesterday).

Today the electrician is threatening to come and do most if not all of the things we have hired him to do: replace the antiquated fuse box with circuit breakers, put plugs and lights in the garage, replace bad sockets in the house. It should be cool when we get all this done. I got up early and did a load of dishes and am running the dishwasher right now in hopes that when the electricity goes down for a few hours it will already be done.

I haven’t been putting pics in my blog recently. I think this is connected to my own thinking which is more in prose and poetry than images. And I have been thinking, musing on stuff. 

Today I am going to try to take a day off. I have already warned my parents that I would not be by today for a chat. I find it a bit sad that my Dad will probably not recall this, but console myself with the fact that this Monday at least my parents will be enjoying a drop in from my brother who is visiting. A week ago Tuesday my Dad told me he was missing seeing Eileen and me. I pointed out that  I had seen him on Saturday even as I realized that his time sense is pretty much gone. So I am trying to drop in more and chat. And not disturb him with too many ideas that will upset him like the fact that his refusal to go to adult day care is hastening the time when he and Mom will be living apart. Stuff like that.

I would like to spend my day composing, practicing, reading and cooking. We’ll see how that works out. My fabulously successful composer friend asked me what I was working on now. He himself has not composed anything this year. He has declared a moratorium on commissions. Hah. I think I have had one commission, but then again I have chosen a different path than my friend. Anyway, since he asked I told him about my little project to come up with a more practical version of Bach’s cantata 140 “Wachet Auf” the first movement. I won’t go into detail about it here other to say I am trimming and re-writing Bach’s original to preserve the beautiful choral lines and make it short enough to consider using in liturgy.

I would like to spend part of my day off working on that.

I started outlining Dennett’s Consciousness Explained this morning. The ideas in this book have grabbed my imagination. I am fascinated to conceive of consciousness as explainable. Maybe I’ll break down and buy a copy so I won’t have to outline the whole fucking book.

Also I keep thinking of making some apple pies. The man putting up our siding has charmed Eileen and me. He seems to be someone who quietly takes pride in his work. Eileen thinks I should make him a pie. So maybe today I will.

I was looking through an old New Yorker yesterday that I seem never to have read and found a sad beautiful poem about who outlives who in a couple living together. Since I am watching my parents go through this final stage of their lives this is in my thoughts. and of course I have wondered who will die first, me or my lovely wife. Anyway, here’s the link if you god forbid want to read a poem: “One Day” by Grace Paley.

I played jazz with my colleague, Jordan VanHemert, for about four hours yesterday at a 60th wedding anniversary. The husband and wife did most of the dancing. The wife is a yoga instructor and I believe the husband is a retired engineer. Anyway they  had a beautiful home on the shores of lake michigan. Unlike so many gigs, the husband promptly paid us right after we played. They were very appreciative of our playing. 

This morning definitely feels like the morning after.  Since I am a bit of an extrovert, a four hour gig usually leaves me feeling a bit drained and foolish. I tend to put my entire self into my playing. And when I improvise, it’s unlike any other kind of playing/composing. Very exhilarating. But then the introvert in me keeps thinking of the silly moments of a public occasion. Like when someone snapped my photograph in the middle of tasting the wonderful food. I think I wake up the next day inside out. Anyway, some of my playing yesterday was actually at the top of my game.  I miss playing with other people who can play their instruments.

I’m sort of dreading the whole fakey church thing this morning. My adult choir has the sunday off and I had a last minute request from the youth choir director to accompany this morning’s anthem. she and I seem to have much different ideas about church music. When I first came, she offered to accompany the adult choir but stipulated that she would not do rehearsals. I declined since I think rehearsals are pretty important. Since then when ever she asks me to accompany the youth choir, it’s usually last minute and with little or even no rehearsal. I don’t find this too intimidating as a keyboard player, it’s just not how I do stuff with my choirs. I think it might be a college thing. The choral director I worked for at Notre Dame seemed to wing every rehearsal and performance. He was good at it. But it often left the hapless accompanist (me) in the dust. 

I have noticed that the increased stress of caring for my failing parents has made me more sure of my own convictions and skills in the rest of my life.  So I’m pretty sure that my professional instincts about stuff like rehearsing and competency are on target. I still try not to be unhelpful in the way I behave and share my insights. This takes energy. So I guess I’m dreading church again this morning.

It’s probably largely because I’m exhausted from yesterday (the 57 year old acting like he’s 27). 

At the party, the husband told a couple of stories about musicians he has seen like Glen Miller and Jack Teagarden. I have heard him tell these stories before. This time some of the people in the story were different. I found that amusing and even charming. He accidentally overpaid us by about fifty dollars. I returned his moolah. I try not to take money from people when they are inebriated. Heh.

I have been thinking a bit about collegiality and collaboration.  I listen to my brother the priest talk about the many colleagues in his professional life. One of the things I liked most about grad school was having people to discuss even argue about music and other stuff with. Also play music with. 

I am realizing how much I have isolated myself from conventional collegiality. Much of this isolation results from my own eccentric take on music and life and the local community where I live. When I lived in Detroit I was very active with the American Guild of Organist. I helped plan a national convention there. I sat in on many meetings. I was active on the Episcopal Diocesan Commission on Music and actually edited the little zine this group put out called “Pipeline.” 

Since moving to the west side of the state, I have been active in the Roman Catholic National Pastoral Musicians organization. I have had good collegial relationships with many Roman Catholic musicians. But at this stage in my life, it occurs to me that the number of breathing musicians and colleagues in my life is kind of low.

My extended family continues to be my most active community and it is one in which ideas are important and for that I am very thankful. 

Probably my most important professional colleague right now is my priest. It’s kind of tricky to be an appropriate colleague with your boss. The area of our collegiality (church and its attendent issues and struggles) is not even my primary interest these days but I do find my boss a good solid colleague I can talk freely with.  My definition of colleagiality includes being able to express myself freely even passionately to someone and not ruffle them. It also includes assuming competence and learning from the conversation. Musical collegiality would include shop talk and playing music with people who can play their instrument or are competent singers or interesting composers.

I have been thinking a bit about how I ended up like this. I think the specific circumstances like living in an area that is largely anti-intellectual and being older than most people I deal with are not that interesting. In fact how I got to this point is not that interesting except to a few intimates. What is more interesting is that I am managing to eek out collegiality at all in the musical desert I live. 

First of all I do have a few breathing people that I work with and talk to besides my family and boss. My friend Jonathon Fegel, singer, song-writer and general creative interesting person, is a delight to work with and to talk to. Today I am going to play a jazz gig with my colleague, Jordan VanHemert sax player extraordinaire. Both of these men are about half my age. They are both as eccentric as I am myself. So I am managing to find some colleagues to make music with from time to time.

Yesterday I called one of those people I knew in grad school. He has carved out a career in church music and is working for a large liturgical church in the Midwest. We were very close colleagues in school. I’m not mentioning his name because I want to share a fact that he is not comfortable with yet and that is that a young doctoral student is writing his doctoral thesis on his compositions. I think this is very cool and kind of funny. This person is a good composer and he and I have discussed composing many times. Over the years our views about composition and church music have diverged considerably. He, I think it’s fair to say, has gotten or remained more conservative. I more radical. He has succeeded in publishing hundreds of thousands of copies of his church music and I have done some of this but have ceased to submit manuscripts to church music publishers at this point.

But yesterday I needed to hear a collegial musician’s voice so I called him up. It was great to talk to someone who at least can understand much of my own professional stance if not condone it and also lives the composer’s life.

I have some other church musician and composer colleagues in this area but our connections are sporadic. I have alienated myself from the local American Guild of Organists. Some of this stems from the fact that the organ teacher at the local college was in open conflict with my teacher at my college in Detroit when I was working on my bachelors. I have tried to repair this a bit. But actually more fundamental is the fact that my philosophy differs radically from most trained musicians my age and older that I rub shoulders with locally.

But I do not actually starve for collegial conversation. I just have it with the dead and absent. My world is populated by people I don’t talk to in person. I feel like Sir Monocle and I have collegial  connection via our blogs. There are web sites that I read regularly like Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise  and others that I read and leave comments at like Kyle Gann’s PostClassic and Full of Grace: Composing Sacred Music. Everyday I sit at my piano, organ or guitar and connect to the heart and soul of musicians whom I consider great and important in my world (that would be people like Bach, Schubert, Bartok, John Adams). Not to mention the people whose writings I read in sundry fields. 

These people are actually my collegial community. I would prefer breathing types. But I think it’s silly to live in a small Republican Dutch Reformed community in Western Michigan and then complain that people are not interested in what I am interested in or share my points of view.

Thank you God for the few friends colleagues I have left and the wonderful music and books that keep me alive and also the INTERNET.