I played through several
dances by Francois
Couperin last night.

I do admire this man and
his work.

Afterwards Eileen
and I
watched the
movie, “Unknown.”
It tried very hard to
be one of those
movies that keep
you guessing. But
the premise that
everyone in a warehouse
somewhere suddenly
lost their memory
and couldn’t remember
their role in an
ongoing crime
(victim or perp)
was just too
thin a premise for
me.

Just got off the
phone with the
doctor. I made
an appointment
to have him look
at my right ear.

It has been stuffed
up on and off for
several weeks.
Finally it is acting
up when I can
actually get to the
doctor.

Just in case you’re wondering who Chuck Norris endorses for president (It’s Newt Gingrich…. sure he has personal past shortcomings… and He’s by no means a perfect man or candidate , but Chuck believes Newt is a Republican as they used to be)

… and just in case you’re not clear on why Newt as a God fearing man is a good, choice check out Norris’s contention that the founding fathers were clear about about the necessity for having Christians at the head of the USA. He quotes Rev Daniel Foster who was speaking to Governor John Hancock, Lieutenant-Governor Samuel Adams, and both houses of the Massachusetts legislature in 1790.

From Norris’s column

For Foster and our Founders, government is a ”divine appointment,” an ordained institution of God, and ”an important mean of delivering us from the evils of the apostasy; and designed to prepare us for the more encouraging restraints the gospel enjoins.” As such, it too has Jesus Christ, not some nebulous and neutered god, as its head.

Right. Newt. You can see what a good idea it is from the company he keeps:

Eileen and I bought several books about Mandarin Chinese yesterday.

This book has only pinyin
or romanizaed characters
in it. We bought one
of these for each
of us. I don’t think
I have enough days
between now and
our trip to do too much
learning. But I am
combining it with
some other books
we bought

like:
This book teaches
both vocab and
characters.
It teaches
and emphasizes
practicing writing
characters.
It
starts
with numbers
which are pretty easy.

Also bought this one

It’s really quite good
and I am thinking it
might be one to
bring along.

It has been designed
for the absolute
language beginner.

This morning I
got up and practiced.
I have about ten
characters and
compounds I am
trying to remember
at this point.

My goal is not be stupified in another country. Not sure about learning how to communicate very much in such a short time. Actually I am pretty sure I can’t learn too much in that way. But I like being as aware as I can of what’s going on around me and having some sort of a context.

So I am about half way through a history of China (China: A New History by Kingsford mentioned before) and doing a bit of surfing of pronunciation web sites. There are a lot of them.

I found a memory game this morning that just works with numbers. Pretty cool.

Just finished reading Jeffrey Toobin’s article,”Google’s Moon Shot.” I received my New Yorker today but I notice the article’s been online since Wednesday.

It’s about Google’s project to scan all books into a database. I think this is a beautiful idea. Of course they are getting their ass sued off.

Just as YouTube had to bow to
Viacom recently. Sheesh. When
will these people quit looking at the
short term buck and figure out that
networking of interconnected
information and
art could be a cool future?

9:18 AM

Began working on getting a small notion about Chinese today. After all, our flight leaves in about four weeks.

Yesterday, Eileen pointed me toward a Chinese Memory game online. I keep saying that it would make sense to play a sort of matching game to familiarize myself with a few ideograms. Eileen has been working harder on the spoken language.

This site has a list of the most common Chinese characters. In order to see them, I had to install an XP patch of some sort. I started out in Explorer (which I rarely use) and it walked me through installing the needed stuff. Then I accidentally reloaded the page in Mozilla and Yahah! it worked. Thank goodness. I am so disgusted at Microsoft right now. Why vista? Could it be another way to convert old tired ideas into new money? Consumer’s money? Yikes.

So I printed up the first seven pages of the most common Chinese characters.

Had a look at a couple pronunciation guides online and started fooling around with it.

After Eileen gets up, we are planning a trip to Barnes & Noble to see if we can buy a set of Chinese flash cards. If not, I’m pretty sure I could print something up anyway.

4:44 PM

It’s been a good day. Even though it is really cold out.

I’m listening to Joni Mitchell’s Miles of Aisles record on Napster. I think I still have the vinyl in the basement. I like this record quite a bit because it’s mostly Mitchell playing convincing renditions of her songs with a kick-ass back up group. All live recordings.

I hooked up my remote speakers and cooked this afternoon.

Am making beef stroganof for my carnivorous wife and calzone for both of us.

I kept thinking of Eileen’s recent comment that so many people do not take the time to prepare food from scratch these days. Surely that’s not true. It’s so much fun. At least for me, anyway.

I took some time off and went and practiced organ a bit.  Put the stroganof in the slow cooker for safety’s sake (I don’t like to leave food on the stove in the house while I am gone.)

The mailman seems to have skipped my house. Ok. So my path is a bit full of snow. But it’s only a few steps from the main sidewalk which they keep pretty clear. Maybe I didn’t have mail. Maybe.

I’m still waiting for a check from Holland High school for the work I did for the musical in December. Good grief.

I am beginning to wonder if it’s ever going to come.

Money is kind of tight right now due to getting cut back at GVSU to one class (Did I mention that? Alright, I know I’m harping on this) and going to China. But whothehell. I’m not known for my belief in the concept of money anyway.

However, I do like to pay bills I owe.

Silly me.
I have decided to charge my solo and ensemble students that I accompany a flat fifty bucks. In years past, I have made the fee a minimum thirty bucks so that people could afford to have their kids accompanied. Now that feels a bit low.

I have three scheduled for Feb 17. They are all playing real music. Concertos mostly…. Haydn Cello, Poulenc flute sonata or concerto and a generic violin concerto…. I see the music to the last two on Monday evening. Ahem. I just hope I can play them.

8:34 AM

Well it’s Friday and I’m not feeling as exhausted as I have the past few Fridays. That’s a good thing.

My life is good. I know it.

I resolved my issues (in my mind) with the student I allowed to preoccupy me yesterday afternoon. I will pull him aside on Tuesday and tell him I have changed my mind about making an exception for him. I will point out that it’s still not too late to drop my class. Heh.

Exceptions do not help anyone. I think they especially don’t help the person asking for the exception.

I’m listening to an old CD mix tape I put on this morning. It started with a Fiji Shuffle, then went on to a Shins tune, a Vivaldi Oboe concerto movement and right now I am listening to Balinese Gamelan music.

This music helped me realize how good life is and and how good mine is this very day.

3:52 PM

It drives me crazy that I let stuff like college get to me.

A student accused me of being unfair today and it kept bugging me for the whole drive home.

And it bugs me that it bugs me. Ay yi yi.

I know part of my over reaction is that I am feeling guilty about deciding not demonstrate harpsichord for this class. I am cheating the class because I am disgusted with the department.

I feel like if I arrange for this class to have the extra benefit of a live demo of harpsichord, I am kind of a sap after the college has cut me back to one class and the chair has made it clear to me that I am too big for my britches, much less a colleague.

Another reason I have dropped the harpsichord demo is the class is so big. The room that the college’s harpsichord is in is very small (it’s a two teacher office). In the best of all possible worlds, I could ask the department to let me have the harpsichord moved to a larger room so I could demonstrate it. Or I could drag my harpsichord up and demonstrate it in the commons area right outside the auditorium in the music building.

Or I could just forget it.

So I think I’m just where can i buy cheap diazepam going to forget it. But I can’t help feeling guilty.

I came and composed a note that would rectify any misunderstanding of my classroom policies for people who think I am unfair. I didn’t post it yet.

Then I worked on preparing a score for rehearsal tonight. A million years ago (1981) I did a little canatata based on T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Ash Wednesday.” I wrote and performed this piece when I was working at a Presbyterian church in downtown Detroit. I haven’t thought too much about this piece since about 1984 when I copied over about half the score (don’t remember why… probably delusions of marketibily).

Anyway, lines from Eliot have been going through my mind quite a bit in the last few weeks:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive toward such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)….

It seems to me that this is important for me. And if it’s important for me, why not do it during the Ash Wednesday service? Why not?

So we start rehearsing it tonight.

1:32 PM at GVSU 

I haven’t blogged for a couple of days. I have been spending a lot of time reading up on China and practicing organ.

I have been playing Bach transcriptions of Vivaldi and Prinz concertos. I like these pieces. I seem to be attracted to music that has energy and is kind of obvious. I was feeling guilty yesterday a bit and added the prelude of the Bach  C major 9/8 Prelude. also nice music of course.

I am playing one of the Schubler chorales for my prelude on Sunday: Wer nur den lieben Gott BWV 647. We are singing the tune as the closing hymn: “If thou but suffer God to guide you.” (I’m going to do a postlude based on the same chorale by Walther. )

Some organists sort of look down on the Schubler chorales because Bach transcribed them from cantata movements. I actually like them quite a bit and play some other modern transcriptions of Cantata movements. But I admit that practicing the Schubler chorales and the Bach versions of Baroque concertos made me feel like I should add some “real”  music by Bach to my rehearsals.

Hence the C major 9/8 Prelude.

Whippy skippy.

8:00 AM

I had three music dreams last night. In each dream I was improvising and of course it was great.

In the last dream, the conductor handed me a note. It said, “Life is Good.”

1:06 PM Music: You’re probably wondering why I’m here – Zappa

Got up this morning with the intention of catching up on back issues of the New York Times. I put them in order from oldest to the most recent and started reading them.

Before too long I got distracted and played through some Bach preludes and fugues.

Then I corrected quizzes from last Thursday. Recorded them and started working on reading through 50 homework papers.

Then hooked up my healed computer.

I bought John King Fairbank‘s “China: A New
History” yesterday at a local used book store.
I go over there about once a month
because the turnover is pretty slow.
This is an extremely readable update for
Westerners about China. Apparently King
died a couple days after it was published
in 1991. I’m on chapter 3 right now and
enjoying it.

It also motivated me to look up my old
copy of the Confucian Odes. At one time
in my life, I was very interested in Ezra Pound and bought his rendition of the Odes.

Pound was a cranky old modernist and very
eccentric. His “translations” of the Odes
are very much a complete re-working
in Western forms (not to say complete
new poems) and say much more about
Pound than the Odes.

Nevertheless, I have read in them
and do have a bit of a memory of them. I’m sure I will have to do more reading if I really want to know about Confusious and the time of Imperial Confucianism (which I admit does interest me).

King makes it clear that the more the Western reader can shed some of his/her ideas the better one can get a bit closer to understanding the unique history of China.

I was sorry to find out King was dead because I am enjoying his whole approach quite a bit.

I’m trying to do a bit of reading so I will have some concept of China when I visit there in a couple of months.

12:43 PM Music: Who are the brain police? Zappa

So far so good. My old computer is healed and I have just hooked it up and am using it right now.

The young man who worked on it at first declined to charge me any labor. He put a new power pack in it and disconnected the F drive which is apparently screwing everything up (aha! just as I suspected). He quoted only the cost of the power pack to me.

When I asked him why he wasn’t charging me any labor he replied, “Because you’re a friend of my Dad’s.”

I managed to get him to charge me the regular charges. Still very economical: power pack 50 bucks, 25 bucks labor. What a bargain.

I re-organized my cords (a little bit) and vacuumed all the dust I could find before hooking the old computer back up.

I’m wondering what the absence of the F drive will mean to programs I try to run. I have been trying to avoid using it, but wouldn’t be surprised if I still was running some programs off of it. I’m sure it will become evident if this is the case.

I had a pretty cosmpolitan morning at the computer.

Chatted with Jeremy in China for a bit… then later with Sarah in the UK. The internet is nifty.

Way back in 1981, I wrote a little cantata called “Ash Wednesday” that I have been thinking about lately.

The text is from T.S. Eliot‘s poem of the same name.

Originally it was written for SATB, soprano, alto, and tenor soloists (I think in the performance I had my brother sing the alto as a baritone solo), oboe (doubling on recorder in one movement), guitar, harpsichord, and cello.

Anyway, I never did a finished score and performed it from a messy draft score.

I think about this poem quite a bit. Especially the part that says: “Teach us to care. And not to care. Teach us to sit still.” This is still an important thought for me.

Ash Wednesday is probably too close to consider vamping this piece up for this year. But nevertheless I spent some time today trying to piece together the original score. This involved copying parts into a score just to see what the heck I wrote.

There were several instrumental movements (that I called Death Dances) plus the choral/solo movements. I like what I can remember and see in the messy scores so far. I’m thinking I could probably salvage parts of it and make one or two anthems and some instrumental pieces out of it.

The first step is to reconstruct the original intent. Then evaluate.

Got up and read through the State of the Union from last night. I tried to listen to it but quickly fell asleep.

Looking through some of the coverage in the NYT, I just don’t understand the little word tally they play: How many times Bush uses the word, Iraq or oil. It’s like the WAY he uses the words is not important or at least not as quantifiable. What nonsense. This is not reporting in my book.

It helps to think about the words used in conversation and in a speech. But I think it helps more to think about the meaning in the conversation or the speech.

Ultimately, language is about ideas. Political language often is a language of misdirection or making an idea less clear so that it is ostensibly more palatable to more of the electorate. This is frustrating when you are trying to understand what people are truly saying.

I heard a funny thing on the radio this morning. A commentator was saying he has a little litany of quotes he repeats that show why people distrust government and specifically presidents:

“I am not going to send American boys to do what Asian boys are supposed to do,”

“I am not a crook,”

“I did not know anything about Iran-Contra,”

“Read my lips: No new taxes,”

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman,”

or, to paraphrase, “we are in imminent danger of weapons of mass destruction.”

I googled this and found the quotes in this article.

In the middle of the last paragraph, Elizabeth the daughter called from China and Eileen called from work.

After reading the State of the Union, I sat down at the piano and played through the first two fugues from WTC by Bach.

Read the introduction and a portion of Letters to Felice by Kafka.

I have been listening to Mahler’s first symphony for some reason.

Finished the Trial yesterday. Now I’m reading all the unfinished chapters in the back of the book. Thinking seriously of starting this one again.

Class went okay today. I couldn’t read them. Much less talk today. hard to have class participation (which many of them professed to like on their student infos) if no one talks.

I mentioned the Arabic culture in my prep for our Koranic chant piece.  People didn’t know that our numbers and especially zero come from this culture.  I might be wrong, but the class seemed a tad hostile around this issue.

10:13 AM

Eileen is off swimming without me. I’m still not quite up to speed with this cold/flu thing. Apparently this stuff hangs on for weeks. Great.

I’m working from my backup computer and just discovered that its clock is an hour behind. When I tried to automatically update it via the web, it didn’t fix it. Screw it, I just set it myself.

I’m on the last chapter of The Trial and am seriously beginning to think of immediately re-reading it.  Kafka reminds me so much of Lewis Carroll. Everything is a dream like Carroll’s Wonderland and Looking-Glass. However, it’s a bit of a  low-grade anxiety nightmare at all times.

Am gradually loading up this computer with what I need to do my stuff. This morning I put the software on it that allows me to manage my Zen Creative MP3 player. I need this to do my playlist for tomorrow’s lecture.

Also hooked up my huge exterior drive to it. This back-up drive is where I keep everything important. So when the computer goes down it’s not near as nerve wracking. I haven’t figured out what to do when this drive fails. Start over I guess.

I was listening to an essay on Kafka last night and it pointed out that Kafka never writes the word Jew in all his stories. The essay writer thought this was interesting because Kafka was Jewish but was seeking a wider audience than German Jews. Who knows? Not sure what this means to his writings.

I just finished Chapter 9 of The Trial which takes place in a huge empty cathedral. Joseph K. (the main character) runs into a priest who tells him a parable about the Law and ends up admitting that he is the prison chaplain and is part of the Court. This is a chilling chapter and is about much more than church or even the Court.

Also, the first story on my Kafka audio CD takes place in a church (presumably Christian/Lutheran/German, eh?).  The CD calls this story something like “Conversation with a Worshipper” from “Three early stories.”

My complete Kafka short stories shows this as part of a larger story (the first in the collection) called “Description of a Struggle.” It is called “Beginning of a Conversation with a Supplicant.” These are probably edition and translation discrepancies, no doubt.

The more I look at Kafka’s and read portions of it, the more I understand why people think he’s so good. There is layer after layer in the meaning. I like that.

My main computer died this afternoon. Eileen was blithely playing away at a game and suddenly: BAM. Nothing. I messed with it for a while but I think it’s really dead. I will take it to the computer doctor tomorrow.

In the meantime, I am using my quasi-son-in-law’s computer which is sitting in my living room. I have hooked up my printer and back up exterior drive to it and all is pretty much okay at this point.

Church went well today. Afterwards a couple of the basses were trying to gently tell me I was a bit stressed. I admitted it. I was actually a bit ill which made me kind of hyper. I changed the interp on the anthem and choir was doing its best to follow me. It ended up going very well.

I also rewrote both the descants after Thursdays rehearsal. This church has a file of descants they have used in the past. I have lazily just grabbed them in the past and used them. I tried to do that with one Thursday and it was awful. I spent Friday morning writing a new one and then sent it to all my sopranos. The descants went well.

I have to go read the paper.

9:06 AM

Read the scene in The Trial by Kafka this morning where K. wanders around a big empty cathedral and is eventually accosted by a preacher high up in a pulpit. Surreal stuff really.

The preacher tells him this odd story about a doorkeeper and a man seeking to enter the Law through the door. The man spends his entire life just outside the door waiting to be called in. At the end of his life, the doorkeeper tells him that this door was only for him and now it will be closed.

The Trial is not quite what I pictured it to be. It is much more day to day humdrum sprinkled with very odd little stuff. I guess that’s Kafka.

1:09 PM

I finished correcting
tests and homework.
Sheesh. It is a lot of
work. That’s not really
me in the picture. I
just thought it was
kind of a funny pic.

At the beginning of each
term, I seem to obsess
about one composer in
in my private thoughts.
This term, it’s Schubert
for some reason.

I know that many students
relate to Schubert. (Alright
many is a relative term but
I do see that some students remark
on their homework how much
they like Schubert’s unfinished
Symphony on the listening).

For some reason I have been playing through his Impromptus and Moments Musical. This AM I treated myself to his Sonata in Bb. First I listened to the recording while I corrected papers. Then for positive reinforcement for getting that done, I let myself sit and play through it at the piano.

Schubert’s melodies continue to have a specific charm. And I always like it when he jumps to an odd chord, usually at a surprising third relationship.
I watched some more
of Bernstein’s Young
People’s Concerts last
night. I watched the
one on “American Music.”
I found it embaressing
how he dismissed the
influence of
Native Americans
and “Negroes” on
American music.

Granted it was 1958,
but I expected more
of a composer of
his abilities.

He discussed jazz
but left African Americans
entirely out of the
discussion.

I found an essay of
his from 1959 where
he did a bit better and mentioned Scott Joplin (academics
seem to love Joplin because he doesn’t involve improv?) and also (gasp) the blues. Eileen thinks I’m being too hard on him and sort of reading back into the pre Civil Rights era. She’s probably right, but I reserve the right to be unreasonable.

I teach about racism and American music. After listening to Bernstein’s televised comments from 1958, I am more convinced than ever that people benefit from understanding the impact of racism on the history of music (and even the present).

I’m putting all these pictures
on the right because
I’m still trying to figure
out WordPress (how
it wraps around pics
for instance, ahem).

I burned an audio
CD of proust’s beginning
chapter for Eileen to fall
asleep to when
she can’t find anything else.
This is a great chapter. He talks
about falling asleep and waking up and not being sure exactly where you were in time and space. I love this chapter. It’s called “overture.”