” ‘The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.’ The music and words of Utah Phillips. That’s one of the quotes environmentalist Paul Hawken uses in his new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. ” Amy Goodman interviews Paul Hawken.… there seems to be a significant typo in this anecdote in the interview:

There was a wonderful quote from Martha Graham, and she was with Agnes de Mille, and they’re both choreographers, of course, and Agnes de Mille was just really devastated by one of her shows, which had won awards on Broadway and then collapsed six months later. And she was bemoaning her fate to Martha Graham, and Martha Graham turned to her and said, “You know, we’re artists, and we’re never dissatisfied. There is this queer dissatisfaction that makes us march and makes us more alive than the other, this blessed unrest.” And so, to me, it was a term that had arms big enough to hold this vast and complex and diverse movement that is trying to restore justice and the environment in the world.

_______________________________________________

UK Licensing rules are messing up live performers and club owners

___________________________________________

15 painfully unforgetable cartoon theme songs
Man. I didn’t recognize but one or two.

A Fair(y) Use Tale

this is pretty funny. The video uses bits of Disney to teach copyright and lambast Disney.

woke up a bit grumpy this morning. Here’s pictures of peonies from the yard in the morning light.

Last night I made “Potato Pea Curry” from The Clueless Vegetarian.

I love this cookbook. This is a simple recipe: potatos, onions, peas, …. you have to have garam masala (which is just a middle eastern spice mixture… ) and fresh mint or cilantro.

It turned out great.

This morning I decided I wanted to have chutney with it today. I have read that people who eat chutney regularly make their own. This makes sense to me because imported chutney in a jar or can sometimes tastes pretty weird to me. Although I never had any chutney in a restaurant that didn’t taste great.
I cobbled together some chutney using what I have on hand (apples, ginger) and looking at some recipes on line. I think the important thing for chutney is the fruit, ginger, sugar and vinegar. I always add the obligatory cayenne pepper to make it spicey.

I have it in the pot now and it’s simmering. Mmmmm. Smells great. I put in garlic, lemon, lime, onion, mustard seed, a handful of raisins, garam masala. I decided to use a 2 to 1 proportion for brown sugar and red wine vinegar to see how that works.
Chutney and yogurt go great with a curry.

Instead of booting up the computer this morning I put on a recording of the Bach B minor Mass and listened to the first few movements.

Napster refused to play tracks for me on Saturday, so my attraction to booting up is diminished when I am thinking of listening to music.

I pulled out the Dover score after a bit and followed the “Christe Eleison” duet. The Dover score has the women’s voice parts written in the soprano clef. It occurred to me to attempt to play them. I have always thrown myself at clef transposition and had limited success.

But one of the insights I have had recently is that often in my musical education I have attempted material far to hard for me. For example, an organist told me that he prepared for the FAGO exam (a difficult accreditation given by the American Guild of Organists. If you pass you are a “fellow.” A bit sexist, eh?) by taking Bach chorales and transposing them in all keys. I tried it. I found it (and still do find it) very difficult. Hence my transposing didn’t improve as much then as later.

My friend Nick Palmer told me that when he was in undergrad school he was pointed toward the piano accompaniments of Schubert lieder for transposition exercises. When I looked at these I found them much much easier than a Bach chorale.

So when I was thinking of stretching my musical muscles by attempting to play through the “Christe” vocal parts I realized that I should concentrate on the two lines in the difficult score and only add the bass and the obbligato when I could. This worked out pretty well.

Then for some reason I was in the mood to think about Haydn. Picked up Charles Rosen’s book that I have been reading (“The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven”). One of the many things I like about this book is that he provides pretty complete excerpts of works reduced for playing at the piano. Played through the exposition section of a Haydn String quartet in Bb major, op. 50, no.1. Rosen is very convincing about Haydn’s cleverness. But I don’t need convincing. I have thought Haydn was clever ever since I took a grad course on him.

Rosen demonstrates how Haydn takes two simple musical ideas (a simple repeated note begins the pretty easy cello part written for King of Prussia to play and a slightly elaborated turn figure – Eb, F, G, Eb, D) and uses them as the structural unit for the entire movement.

Haydn tends to take a musical idea and development it structurally in ways that are economical and amazing.

I like the fact that Rosen points out that it’s easier to hear Haydn’s musical ideas than see them on the page. In other words, Haydn is writing for the ear not the eye.

I have been noticing lately the difference between an extended theoretical discussion of the building blocks of specific music and the experience of playing and listening to it. Nothing beats playing and listening.

I’m off to play through the exposition section of this string quartet once again. If my Napster were working, I would see if it’s online. Hey I haven’t been kicked out of GVSU yet. Maybe I’ll check for it on Naxos (which is provided for teachers and students at GVSU).

“I’m not in Kansas anymore. I would love to be in Kansas.”

Paul Reubens

Mark Helprin has a frustrating article in today’s New York Times: “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” He thinks it’s self evident that ideas (art, music, books) deserve the same protection as real property. Good grief. It seems so naive to me to think that your take is the only one that makes sense. He ends this way:

“No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.”

This seems like an example of false causality to me. Or at least a false connection.

Admittedly I am on the other side of this discussion, but the free flow of the work of the spirt and the mind is necessary for any artists, musician or thinker (emphasis on “free”) to do their work in the first place. So from my point of view, it’s not “disfavor” to make ideas free. It’s actually “favor.”

I guess we won’t even need the word “reification” anymore. Since in Halpren’s estimation ideas and things are the same thing.

I wonder about the idea that creators own their creations. What exactly have they created? The alphabet they used? No. The language? No. The words? No.  The ideas? The stories? Hmmm. Can’t all stories be reduced to some awful formula like “boy meets girl” “boy loses girl” “boy fights war to get girl back” .
My usual reaction to artists who don’t want to share beauty and truth is that they can keep their little corner on it. There is so much beauty, truth and great stories out there. It’s hard for me to think I’m going to miss one person’s take on life. Especially since I am not thinking of J.S. Bach, Charles Dickens or Charlie Parker.

The idea that people who want to learn more about life and experience art or read books need to be paying an admission charge reduces one of the best things in life to a transaction. It makes ideas not only things but things for sale, commodities.

It’s not that I don’t think creators should have a place to sleep and food to eat and books to read and the internet (some of my basic needs, ahem). I’m a creator for heaven’s sakes. I just think that usually the protections do not end up protecting creators so much as other people’s investments.  By all means, pay the creator. But I always secretly liked the idea of stipend, paying someone to free them up to do what needs to be done.

Recently, I was listening to someone talk and she used the word, Jew, as a verb meaning to argue someone down. It took my breath away. I gently suggested that maybe she didn’t want to use that word as a verb. She immediately agreed.

I hate being the PC Police of course. But I do think about words. I think our vocab is built into our subconscious. I continue to examine the way I speak to see if I am saying things I really want to say.

Take the word “gyp.” The online American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “to defraud or rob by some sharp practice: swindle; cheat” when it’s a verb and “a swindle or fraud” when it’s a noun. It suggests the etymology is a “back formation from Gypsy.”

I’m not sure what a “back formation” is exactly. Probably a usage that reminds people of a word or something.

Under the word, Gypsy, they suggest that the 16th century origin was a corrupted form of Egyptian in the mistaken belief that the Roma people originated in Egypt.

Anyway, I can occasionally overhear myself thinking about something “being a gyp.” Then I remember that the word is related to the word Gypsy and has a bigoted slur implied in it.

I believe all people have unreasonable and stupid assumptions built into their head (and their language – not just the obvious perjoratives by the way…. When I was in my twenties and the Magazine MS. had just come out, I got it into my head to write a freelance article on the origin of sex words. Of course, I didn’t have the writing chops to actually get an article published, but I did have the audacity to think I did. Anyway, the article bogged down in the research when I discovered that “woman” comes from “wife” of “man,” and that “fuck” has a strong history that connects it to “strike” as in “hit someone.” Yikes, I remember thinking as I tucked my 3 by 5 research cards away.)
But the implications of our involuntary thoughts and unconcious expressions of hate do not absolve us from the responsibility of monitoring if we are indeed saying what we mean.

Apparently word people conclude that Shyster is not related to Shylock in Shakespeare.

The word, shyster, “appeared first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in July 1843, at first in spellings such as shyseter and shiseter but almost immediately settling down to the form we use now.

The Tombs prison

In the 1840s it was infested by ignorant and unqualified charlatans, who pretended to be lawyers and officers of the court. Before shyster came into being, pettifogger was the usual term for them, a word of obscure origin for lawyers of little scruple or conscience that dates from the sixteenth century. Mike Walsh, the editor of The Subterranean and the first user of shyster, summed up these plaguers of the Tombs in this passage:

Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves make up, with but few exceptions, the disgraceful gang of pettifoggers who swarm about its halls.”

This is lifted from World Wide Words.

It continues:

“Professor Cohen concluded the word derives from German Scheisser for an incompetent person, a term known in New York through the many German immigrants there. Mike Walsh considered it obscene because it derives from Scheisse, shit, through the image of an incontinent old man. This is plausible, because British slang at the same period included the same word, meaning a worthless person; the usual spelling was shicer, though it appeared also as sheisser, shiser and shycer. It’s recorded first in print in Britain in 1846, but must be significantly older in the spoken language. (It was taken to Australia and from the 1850s was used there for an unproductive gold mine.) It may have been exported to New York by London low-lifers.”

Looking back over my many years of learning about music, I can see how pieces in a puzzle were waiting to fall into place. Maybe a good teacher or two could have shown me this. Maybe not. But at any rate, I see the value now in memorizing.

This morning I got up and kept working on memorizing the Jazz standard tune, “All the Things You Are” by Kern and Hammerstein. In Levine’s Jazz Music Theory book, he has a list of tunes you should know if you are going to be a Jazz musician. Then in this list he marks the indispensible tunes. I thought to myself, what the heck, why don’t I memorize a couple?

I made a note of a few of the ones he recommended and pulled up mutliple recordings of them on Napster. I played these as I cleaned house yesterday. I found that I really liked the tune, “All the Things You Are,” and kept sitting down to play along with Ahmad Jamal, Django Reinhart or Parker and Gillespi. Before you know it, I had half the tune in my head from memory.

I refered to Levine’s piano book for a few voicings of the chords. And this is the basic insight I am getting from this study: that jazz chords are not nearly as mystical as I always thought they were. Usually I already know them in some form from playing so much music and doing some experimenting with chords on my own. In fact I have found only one chord that is actually new to me (a sus flat nine if your interested… spelled from the lowest note in the key of A: E, F, A, B, E).

As I memorized this piece I began to understand several things. First, that memorization can internalize music in a way that helps me understand what I already can hear. I had a friend in college (Phil Pilorz) who developed a sort of relative perfect pitch. He could hum any pitch but it took him a second to find it in relationship to the one or two pitches he remembered from playing rock music over and over.

In the same way, “All the things you are” is built on one basic interval over and over in different keys (the Perfect fourth is what musicians call it). I have no trouble remembering the sound of this melody in my head. But if you asked me to sing a certain pitch from memory, I would think to myself, “I don’t have perfect pitch.” But I can remember these pitches. Hmmmm. It seems to me that memorizing could help my self confidence. So what the heck, eh?

I can remember years ago listening to a Paul Simon song (Try a Little Tenderness) and hearing a chord that I remembered from a certain Palestrina or Renaissance piece. I pulled out the other recording and sure enough there was not only the chord but it was the exact same pitches.

I think my interest in Jazz right now is like being interested in a puzzle I can understand. I’m not turning into a Jazz aficionado but I do seem to be studying Jazz right now. Hmmm.

“This book is for anyone who is tired of living life on the surface, tired of letting cable news or daytime talk shows tell you what to believe, how to live, and what to think. It’s for people who want to learn how to read literature or better understand their book club’s latest selection. It’s also for those who’ve always wanted to read great books but never thought they could. It’s about changing your life one page at a time.”

“If you want to learn to read then you must read. That is the secret to reading, and that is the only secret worth knowing. Everything else is a distraction from that one fundamental truth. To read better you must read more. All the time. Every day.”

“I found my Mom’s copy of The Grapes of Wrath when I was fifteen years old and read it in a week, completely caught up in Tom Joad’s journey. Two years later I had to read it in high school, chapter by chapter, study question by study question, vocabulary word by vocabulary word, it was utter torture. I couldn’t believe this was the same book I had read and loved.”

from “ROMAN reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life Through Literature” by Nick Senger (blogs: ROMAN Reading and Literary Compass)
Nick Senger goes on to point out that books usually need to be read straight through the first time…. that books are in the phrase of John Gardner, “an organized and fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind.”

He also makes the comment, “One reason we read books is to change our lives.” I think this also applies to music, poetry and art.

Just as Senger (and Mortimer J. Adler before him) envisions reading as chatting with another human being, I feel that playing through music is a similar experience. I have chosen about six short piano pieces by Rene Touzet to learn. As I learn these pieces the logic of his mind comes through to me as a performer and interpreter. It’s very much like being in the same room with his elegance and interest in Cuban rhythms.

In his case, this is all the more intensified because I know he is pretty obscure. Apparently the only place you can get his music is music store in Coral Gables that his wife brought his remaining stock of published pieces. So he has left an interesting but hard to find path for pianists who are interested in his piano music. He had a performing and recording career and has left recordings of his songs. But these piano works (written in his retirement) make me think of Scarlatti. Scarlatti wrote most of his keybaord sonatas living in the shadows of the Spanish court. I say that because his genre was much less in the limelight in the court than opera. And like Touzet, he was doing it largely for its own sake. He didn’t have to develop the idiosyncratic language that comes out of his composing. He easily could have reeled off insipid tunes. But instead he created a little world of ideas and feelings all his own.

This puts me in mind of Touzet and others.

All of it ends up being conversations with other human minds not limited by time or space.

Kind of like the Internet, heh.

“It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? …
“Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems…
“Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason…

“We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas…

“The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content.”

Al Gore discusses the current situation in , “The Assault on Reason (book excerpt )” Time, May 16, 2007. Excellent article.

This has been a good week for me. I had nice chats with my friends Jonathon and Fuzz. Jonathon and I did some recording. I lost my head and told him that I would help him with a web site where he could put up more than the four mp3s that Myspace.com allows you and even figure out how to do a tip jar (via Paypal?).

Hey. Jonathon’s my friend. He’s on his second CD and his music isn’t easily available.

I worked on one track for his new CD (played piano for him) and listened to another. I really like this guy’s music.

And I’ve been working on my Jazz chops as well as memorizing a Haydn sonata movement.

And I’m working on new song.

My church finally gave me a copy of the software that makes the several hymnals searchable.
Life is good.

I’m going grocery shopping.

Pennsound is a site with free mp3s of poets and other writer types reading their work.

I didn’t see any Dylan Thomas but they do have several trax of Getrude Stein reading short excerpts of her work. (I’m downloading them even as I make this blog entry.)

More that caught my eye:

Pennsound link to Donald Hall reading his work.

Adrienne Rich

Samuel R. Delany’s radio play, “The Star-Pit”

Vachel Lindsay

Norman Mailer

Finished “Spring Snow” by Mishima last night. Went right on with the second in the four volume series, “Runaway Horses.”

“Spring Snow” is about two young men and one young woman. Their story apparently haunts the rest of the four books. Pretty cool.

One of them dies. One ends up in a convent. One survives. The survivor continues on in the second volume. The themes include war, transmigration of souls, the beauty of nature and its relationship to human development, and ancestor worship among many others.

I worked my way through four chapters of my new Piano Jazz book yesterday. It came in the mail along with two other books (Jazz Theory and Jazz History books).

I have been glancing through books that supposedly teach Jazz for years and have never found one that hit me as useful. Until this book. Not sure if it’s the approach this writer uses or my receptiveness. I think it’s probably a bit of both. But maybe more Levine’s approach. Which is very coherent from the getgo.

I’m not really interested in performing Jazz. I would just like to be understand a bit more about it and get some in my fingers. Last year I bought three fake books. These books are standard for young Jazz musicians. You see them at gigs, even. They are full of Jazz tunes with nice Jazz changes in them. Last year I surprised myself by sitting down and playing through these books. I was prepping for a meeting with another late bloomer. Vic the sax player was in love with Jazz and willing to come to my house and “jam.” I wanted to be able to hold my own when we improvved the music he likes.

Even without the Levine approach, I found it easy to lay down the changes and improv with Vic. If he promised to play sax on a gig for me I promised to do a bebop tune on it. He was interested. We rehearsed several times. Then he got a gig in Wisconsin (a day gig) and moved away. O well.

I remember this brush with Jazz yesterday when I was studying Levine’s ideas about Jazz harmony on the piano. At the end of the chapter, Levine suggests that you tranpose the patterns into all keys. And he gives a list of tunes (found in those fake books I bought last year) that specifically apply his concepts. I played through all this yesterday and found it pretty easy.

One of his insights is to take a basic chord pattern (ii7 V I) I have known most of my improvising life and showing how you can see most chord changes through the prism of this simple pattern. It hit me immediately.

I am hoping that his book with continue to make sense to me.

I also received his theory book in the mail.

He uses the same logic in this book as his piano book. In other words the chapters are corallary but he has rewritten it in more general terms for any musician not just pianists.

Both of these titles were in footnotes in Rob Hodson’s book,  “Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz.”

I am reading this book. The author goes to my church and teaches at the local college. I plan to invite him out for coffee to ask him some questions about his book and Jazz in general.

According to the Council of Conservative Citizens’ “Statement of Principles,” the Council believes that “the American people and government should remain European in their composition and character” and supports restricting immigration from non-European and non-Western peoples.” Additionally, the group opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.”

“Racist Group Holds Anti-Immigration Demonstration” May 16 2007

Two of the four articles on the front page of the local paper, “The Holland Sentinel” are about religion today.

The first is an article about Jerry Falwell. I have to admit when I heard that he had died all I could think was “well, there’s one less purveyor of hate in the US.” I’m not proud of that, but it was an involuntary thought.

The article is an AP article but they have added some frightening local stuff:
“I’ve been to a few meetings with him…. He could make friends real easy, you know?” This is Ron Conkiln’s quote. He served on Falwell’s Liberty U board of regents. He lives in Zeeland.

“Roger Ver Lee, a Hudsonville resident who served on the baord of Calvary Baptist Church in Holland, said he first met Falwell at the ground breaking of Liberty University in the early 1970s, and describes Falwell as ‘probably my best friend.'”

Ver Lee goes on, “We were flying in his jet…. He told the pilot to roll the plane, so we went and rolled the plane once. He was always playing a lot of jokes and haviang a lot of fun.”

WE WERE FLYING IN HIS JET?

Is it just me or is that incongrous? The Moral Majority must be about more than hating abortion and gay people, huh? Making money must be in there too…..

Later in the article, “Matt Foreman, executive director of [the] National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, extended concolences to those close to Falwell, but added ‘Unfortunately, we will always remember him as a founder and leader of America’s anti-gay industry, someone who exacerbated the nations’ appalling response to the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, someone who demonized and vilified us for political gain and someone who used religion to divide rather than unite our nation.”

Couldn’t have said that better myself.

The other article was about a Zeeland Area Prayer Initiative which “consists of ministers from several denominations.”

Call me silly, but this atheistic church musician is reminded of the injunction to pray in a closet not publically (and probably not in front of a photographer). Oh well, probably too many gay people in that prayer closet locally anyway.

It just drives me crazy…. Here they go again…. It makes me want to make a note and boycott every track they fine these kids for. Who needs this music? There’s lots of great music out there. Screw RIAA!

“Downloaders face the music as record industry sues”

by Levi Pulkkinen Seattle PI.com May 13, 2007

The wind is blowing here in Western Michigan this morning. It was especially nice before I turned on this silly computer which has a loud hum.

Today I am going over to my friend Jonathon Fegel’s house presumably to do some recording. I find myself in an odd space mentally these days. I seem to be hungry for some reading and thinking. Consequently I am drawn to books by Charles Rosen like the one he wrote on the classical period and also Saint-Simon’s memoirs and some books on Jazz.

I have been memorizing an early Haydn sonata just to prove to myself that I can indeed memorize.

Rosen in his book on piano playing points out how difficult memorizing is for older players. thanks a lot. I’m trying anyway. I have about two pages sort of memorized. Early Haydn is simple and sectional. This is one of the two reasons I chose the piece I am working on… the other is that I marked it with a sticky as one that was so charming I wanted to keep coming back to it….. If anyone is keeping any kind of track of this it’s the Sonata in A (written before 1763) Hob. XVI/5; L8. I like all the movements.

There is a change that came over music in the last 25 years of the 18th century. This is the time of Mozart and Haydn. Rosen is especially insightful about this music. He points out that is rhythmic pacing is the pacing of comedic opera (emphasis on wit and elegance) and its phrasing is the phrasing of dance music. He cleverly points out how structure replaced the function of Baroque varied ornamentation. He is very convincing on this.

It’s sort of nice to have a group of significant piano sonatas by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven to refer to as I think about Rosen’s ideas. Rosen himself is a pianist. Another thing he says in his book on piano is that young concert pianists (of which I am certainly not one, heh) should play through the works of the great piano composers. He was startled to do master classes with top flight pianists in their twenties who had not read the piano works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schuman straight through. He even calculates how long it would take them to read them. It takes me much longer than his calculations because I often play under tempo in order to play accurately.

But reading through these works has had a big impact on my piano technique and understanding of music in general.

This might seem to contradict my resistance to a perfoming canon of great classical and jazz music. But in my mind I distinguish between the need to study music and the needs that music fulfills in listeners.

Charlie Parker apparently listened primarily to classical music and then performed in the living style of his time. Miles Davis studied Prokofiev concurrently with his own innovations in music. These notions make imminent sense to me.

I do wonder about my own current sort of quiescence regarding composing and performing my “tunes” (i.e. what I call my bad paul simon songs). Recently I tried to rehearse “Coming up for air” and decided the song was kind of a piece of crap. This continous dance with your own creations is pretty regular for creators I think. Nevertheless it’s painful sometimes to consider the things you have made and how flimsy and ephemeral they actually are.

I also wonder about my relationship to listeners. Who are they? Do people pull down mp3s from web site? Do they hear what I perform at church and will soon be performing on the street? Who knows?