Spent the morning yesterday sitting next to my Mom in her hospital room in the back of the ER. Got a call from her nursing home that she was slurring her words and very weak. They were concerned enough to send her to the ER. They drew blood and quickly determined that her potassium was way too high and began medicating that. Also they found a sinus infection. She seems to be doing pretty well. I will bop over to her nursing home room and get her hearing aids, glasses and a book for her after my first ballet class this morning.

Recently discovered that the music publisher Boosey and Hawkes has set up an online site where you can view the full score of over 800 compositions. You have to register, but it’s free. Very cool.

Arcade Fire has a new CD out. It’s on Spotify. I have been listening to it. So far it seems uneven at least in the tunes that attract me. I’m making a play list of the ones I like. I figure if I can I will buy mp3s of them.

I have discovered that listening to old albums that I have owned and love that I miss going through the tunes in the order on the albums. This has led me to make playlists of the albums so that the tunes will proceed in the logical original order.

These days it doesn’t seem that the order of tunes is that important in pop music albums. But maybe I’m just old and nostalgic for the old albums.

Confronting the Legacies of Slavery – NYTimes.com

Reparations is always tricky. But in an age where all ethics and morals are reduced to economic terms, they are important and probably necessary.

Report: Millions will lose health plans as ObamaCare takes hold – The Hill’s Healthwatch

Health Policies Canceled in Latest Hurdle for Obamacare – Bloomberg

I was puzzled by this story until I started poking around and reading actual journalism about it. I still have questions about why some people are losing healthcare due to the requirements of the new law. But it’s difficult to determine since the reporting is so slanted and dishonest buy diazepam 2mg tablets (mostly from the right but the media is taking up that mantra in general as far as I can see). You’d never know that many if not most of those losing care are losing it because it’s inferior and doesn’t make the new standards.

Is Pre-K the Answer for Child Literacy? – NYTimes.com

Recent letter in the NYT was very inspiring to me. Here’s the entire thing.

To the Editor:

 Although longtime advocates of the importance of literature for children were heartened by the results of the recent study described in your article, once again it is a case of too little too late. While pre-K is crucial to the literacy of children, especially those from low-income families, far more vital is the children’s room of the local public library.

 Most public libraries, many right in the neighborhood and easily accessible, offer programs to children as young as a few months old. These programs provide modeling and encouragement to parents and caregivers to put down their electronic devices, pick up a book, sing a song, play a game and engage in language-based activities that not only provide an introduction to words in beautifully ordered patterns but also give families something to talk about of value and substance.

 These programs, and the materials available to support them, build habits crucial to long-term connections to language-based learning. For parents with literacy deficits of their own, the library is the place to house initiatives that boost skill level and confidence.

 These programs will help those who care for children discover the satisfaction and solace of a good book and ignite in them the desire to share them with their babies as they grow.

 Language is the very root of what it means to be human. It’s the foundation our democracy stands on. And the time to begin acquiring it in a meaningful way begins at birth and is nurtured at the library.

 AMY COHN Marblehead, Mass., Oct. 22, 2013

 The writer teaches children’s literature at the college level and has worked as a children’s book editor.

Before Malala – NYTimes.com

A little feminist history lesson. Very cool. According to the link, Malala was named after Malalai of Maiwand.

I think that the negative way I ended yesterday’s blog is more about me than the reality of how people hear my music. The choir/organ/piano area is in the back of the church where I work. This is definitely where I do most of my public performing these days. Playing to people’s backs has an effect. Also the people who are standing around in the back (choir, acolytes, readers) blithely engaging in conversation to the point that I am working on strengthening my own ability to concentrate in a noisy hostile area.

Sunday night at Octoberfest, several people approached me with compliments. I need to see more clearly that my musical work for this community is indeed much appreciated.

One person told me that he felt that the music was what kept people coming back to church. This is a dangerous thought when carefully considered. But I believe he was trying to tell me that he thought good music well performed was a valuable thing.

Another person went to some lengths to tell me my piano playing reminded him of the pianist for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. This is high praise to me, since I have always admired this musician.

I thanked him and told him that I liked that guy’s playing as well.

I also told this guy that one of the high points for me in my work is when all the people in the room are doing music together (i.e. singing a hymn or a psalm).

We as a culture get so few chances to “do” music as ordinary people. I think this is a large part of what music is for: an action of a group of humans that creates meaning.

Another woman said that she admired the range of styles in worship. Speaking of that morning’s worship she said there “was something for everyone.” Another compliment framed in a idea fraught with potential confusion. We are not trying to please anyone in our worship together. This leans toward consumerism endemic in our daily lives. No one owns the communal song or prayer.

But still I thanked her and replied that I thought eclecticism was a particularly American genius.

There were a few other people who talked to me Sunday night, complimenting the music.

I think that I need to take my own question to heart and ask myself if I am listening, listening to my listeners?

Yesterday was definitely a work day for me. The choir sounded good. As usual I spent the pregame rehearsal getting the singers to produce their voices correctly and pay attention to details that contribute to a more coherent and beautiful musical interpretation. The organ music was by Vivaldi and Gerald Near. Later in the day I was embarrassed to have played the diluted version of Vivaldi as I heard James Biery nail Bach’s transcription of a Vivaldi concerto.

Biery gave a good organ recital which I felt compelled to attend due to being involved in the local AGO more.

I don’t understand why musicians feel they need to keep people at a concert for more than an hour. I think it was my teacher Craig Cramer who said if you can’t say what you need to say in an hour then you aren’t going to get it said in longer. Or something like that.

At any rate, the audience of about 60 or 70 for the most part did not seem that restless. Eileen said she thought it was long. Many of the listeners were elderly. The man for whom the recital was named is 93 for fuck’s sake. Many in the audience seemed content to listen for that length time. Some were asleep.

We barely had time to catch our breath before Eileen and I jumped in the car and went to the Octoberfest at church kicking off my church’s fall pledge drive. This is an evening of free food and drink (free beer supplied by New Holland Brewery). Music by a student Jazz trio from the local college. They played well for young under grads. I admit I still do not understand the attraction of listening to music from the Real Book. “Girl from Ipanema,” “The falling leaves,” “Body and Soul,” and “HEART! and Soul” were on the playlist. All tired old tunes. For me jazz in its heyday was about innovation and excitement, music that was new and fresh. How you make a curriculum of that part of it I do not know.

I asked these questions a few years ago of a jazz prof at Hope. He gave me a book to read (whose title escapes me) which I remember being largely a defense of why white people can play jazz.

The best argument I have heard for jazz as a living art was Dave Holland’s ensemble when they played here in little old Holland.

Anyway, our table clapped for the solos last night as is jazz practice. Usually I was the one who started the applause because I couldn’t help but listen to what they were playing. Mostly I think music was for background-sound-wallpaper (You’re soaking in it.). Just like church. Which is where we were sitting.

I originally began yesterdays blog post with the idea of pointing out some interesting pairings of non-American stuff in my day on Thursday of last week. Then I bogged down into Zuckermann’s theory of how we pay attention to the world which definitely relates to experiencing a wide range of cultures.

Thursday evening in a new spirit of economic thriftiness (Eileen is on the verge of quitting her job and reducing our income significantly for our retirement), we skipped the expensive CitiVu were we often have our date night and went to our favorite local Mexican restaurant, Margaritas which is not only excellent food but modestly priced.

I had Sopes.

I discovered this wonderful dish a few years ago on Margartias Menu. It is a thick corn tortilla with the topping of your choice. On top of this are refried beans, lettuce, onions, salsa, and on very top acified cream.  The first time I ordered it with veggie fajitas instead of meat, the waitress said she had never heard of this variation but that it sounded good.

It is.

Eileen had a small taco salad.

Then we drove to the concert we had planned to attend of Chicago Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble.

It was a nice pairing of cuisine and music.

Earlier in the day, I had finally listened to a CD that weirdly was in a box of Kitchens of India food.

The boxed fast food had been sitting on my shelves for quite a while because it’s not very good. I recently ate it anyway when I had some left over rice to go with it.

I put the CD in my player in my car to sample it. I was blown away. The music was wonderful.

On Thursday I found myself reading and listening to this CD. The book I was reading is volume 2 of J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, The Siege of Krishnapur. 

Farrell has written a bitter satire on the demise of the empire of Great Britain.

The first volume is Troubles which describes a returning WWI British soldier’s experiences of the “troubles” in Ireland in the first part of the 20th century.

The second volume, The Siege of Krishnapur is a description of the death throes of the East India Company’s hold on India in the 19th century.

It rhymes nicely with the stupidity exhibited in the first story of the Troubles.

The beautiful strains of Indian music on my fast food free CD wafted through the room while I was reading this book Thursday.

Another nice pairing.

Also it’s apt to read about the demise of the British Empire at a time when America is insanely plunging into the future of less and less international influence.

By the end of the evening of I was tickled when the trumpet player and leader of CALJE was working the crowd and yelled out,  “Anybody speak Spanish out there? Hey this is America, of course there are Spanish speakers here.”

I see hope in that.

Ethan Zuckerman talks about how we connect to the vast information about the globe largely through personal connections. If we know someone from Syria, we pay more attention to Syrian and can think about it more imaginatively.

I try to cast a wide net of interest when I inform myself about what’s happening in my world, internationally, nationally and locally. But I realize how futile this kind of effort is when the curators (Zuckeran uses this term) are fast disappearing and being replaced by social connections.

In other words, I used to pick up a New York Times and be serendipitously exposed to international stories I would not have thought about otherwise.

Now I’m just as likely to be following a link from a Facebooger friend or an aggregate web site (I have a folder of bookmarks I call “filter sites” which includes Google news).

I have recently switched the way I read the New York Times. I have been trying out the NYT.com portal for several months, maybe even a year. It mixes up stories chronologically and has a lot more teaser sentences in the way it lays out access for a reader. But I have found that I have missed stories using it.

I have returned to initially reading the Today’s Paper link. This snapshot is more helpful for making sure I had a glance at all current stories. I do return to the NYT.com portal to get a sense of what’s coming to the forefront of their editorial preferences in the moment.

And that’s just one of the many sites I use to check out news.

Zuckerman also quotes some interesting studies that show just who people are connecting with on Facebooger: 22% of  your “friends” are typically people you knew in high school, 20% family, 10% co-workers, 9% college friends, 7% people you have only met online, and 93% are people you know offline. This comes from a 2011 Pew Research report

I currently have 272 “friends” on Facebooger.

I began counting them and sorting them but lost interest after a half hour or so. I came upon a better approach. I am using Facebook’s friends lists (that you can make yourself) to sort and understand just who I am connecting with on this social media site. I’m not done but at this point I think the family is correct. I have 25 Hatch family friended and 24 Jenkins family friended. Combining these two comes to around 18 % and probably represents all of my family “friends.” So that bears out.

I’m still counting other people (adding them to lists). So far my cyber buddies (by this I mean people I connect with online but have never met face to face) number 14. That’s about 5 % so far, again it’s close and there probably those I didn’t add to the list yet.

I connect with 61 local church people. That’s around 22 % by my reckoning. Still working on this list but that’s probably close.

So far I have add 45 people to a list I am calling “colleagues.” This are mostly professional music and church people or some students. 16.5 %.

I just quickly made a high school list (counting Dave Barber whom I really only attended Junior High with but knew during my high school years). It numbers 11. There may be more, but that’s 4% which is significantly lower than the 22% mentioned above.

Anyway, I have to quit for this morning. But I think this is kind of interesting in an admittedly narcissistic way. But I guess that’s part of the Facebooger mirror dance.

I have had a slow aha this week about what it means to live in my little town. It’s felt like a validation. A validation of the importance of passion, curiosity and imagination to me.  I know people who are passionate, even curious, but it’s harder for me to see their imagination in the parameters of what they define as their lives. It just doesn’t seem to occur to many that there is wild wide world out there that might shake up the way they have assessed what it means for them to be alive.

I can forgive (barely) the young man who told me that he moved here from Zeeland (a few miles away and even more myopic that Holland) and found attending Hope College to be revelatory. I think part of shedding of adolescence is that experience of realizing there’s a lot more to life and you sort of start where you are.

This is much harder for me with adults say over 23.

I also have to face the fact that I personally benefit from some of the shortsightedness. I have friends whose religious orientation seems to be sentimental to me. They are not addicted to mediocrity so much as a sweet uncritical blind acceptance of others. I approve of the love but not the blindness. But at the same time I realize that these people accept me and I appreciate and value that.

But mostly I think locals often don’t see me. Invisibility seems to be part of aging. So be it.

I also have noticed something about the way I have been improvising in ballet class. I find myself playing a lot of percussive rhythm piano interspersed with melody and improv. I also find that the time I play, I have been giving it more and more mental (and even physical energy). Some of this comes from buy diazepam online uk next day delivery encouragement from the instructors I have worked with. Often an instructor will point out to the students that the music I am making is pointing them toward a lively and engaged execution of a specific combination.

On Wednesday I found myself talking with an instructor about the relationship between music and dance. I think it is fundamental for me. Gesture and movement are basic musical ideas for me.

I have been reading a bit about Tchaikovsky (Groves online, thank you jesus). Some of his symphonic work has been judged as weak examples of formal musical structure. I wonder about the huge influence of the previous generations (Haydn and Beethoven especially) on the notion that the over arching form of a movement of music is fundamental to its worth. Certainly form is important. But I  have been spending hours with Tchaikovsky’s piano character pieces (specifically a Berceuse) and find the lyric no less important than the formal aspects of the music.

Last night Eileen and I attended a concert by Calje (Chicago Afro-Latin Jazz Ensemble).

The first half of the program was Afro-Latin Jazz pieces. They were interesting compositions (some by the pianist in the group). But the most engaging part for me of this section was listening to the improvisations. I find myself not that attracted to contemporary jazz (which is ironic because I am sometimes misclassifed as a jazz musician myself). The reason is that it seems to be a calcification of historic jazz (which I am attracted to, thank you miles). At the same time improvising always catches my attention since I spend so much time doing that sort of thing myself.

In the second half, a singer came on stage and they did a series of what sounded like Cuban pieces. The energy of the music suddenly made much more sense to me and drew me in.

Getting started slowly this morning. There’s a smattering of snow on the ground in Western Michigan. I am looking forward to the next season here.

I have been realizing how many people I know have spent their entire lives here in Holland. This is their reality even if they have traveled and been educated elsewhere. I’m afraid when this fact combines with the poor education so many people receive the result is a shockingly narrow (and often puritanical) way of seeing life.

It’s helpful to remember this occasionally. I think I have largely conquered my own despair at not being understood by locals. But I have to keep remembering to keep my own passion in check. It is perceived as anxiety or anger more often than I am actually angry or anxious. Mostly I lose patience with people or am stunned at their lack of information and perspective.

I know this sounds insufferable.

I look for ways to treat people  as civilly as I can and when asked to help, be as constructive as I can within the narrow limits of living in a small town, even (unfortunately) a small town with a college.

Having said that, I am pretty happy with my own life.

I have scheduled less hard organ music for the next two weeks so that I can concentrate on learning my part of the organ duet, “Rhapsody” by Naji Hakim. My friend Rhonda Edgington has asked me to learn it and perform it with her on an Advent recital this year. I want to play well since I get fewer and fewer requests like this.

1. Giving a Wife Her Front-Yard Grave, No Matter What – NYTimes.com

Kind of a love story. I liked it.

2. The father of self-help – Salon.com

Dale Carnegie was kind of weirdo. Cool.

3. The Devil You Know: Why Readers Love ‘The Screwtape Letters’ : The New Yorker

I have mixed feelings about C. S. Lewis having read a bunch of his stuff. But I do like The Screwtape Letters.

I had the very odd experience yesterday of attending a committee meeting at my church and then attending a local AGO meeting where the organ builder contracted to put in an organ (Casavant) gave a presentation about the process. I am thinking this morning about the lack of vision and authenticity I experience in both situations and how it relates to the consumerism which dominates our culture.

I experience my church community as an opportunity to present the profundity and beauty of the intersection of excellent music with public prayer. At the same time I am confronted with what Borgmann calls the inevitable “stunted and marginal state” of any church in our culture. What remains of Christian liturgical churches in the USA seems to be vestigial and far from  the “communities of celebration” we as humans so badly need. In the wake and noise of our consumer culture a liturgical Christian community has what is probably an insurmountable task to exist authentically. Our real religion, the one we are all taught and live out daily,  is that the purpose of life is to consume. (Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology, p. 62).

This is a bit harsher than I mean it to sound. I am continually trying to analyse my attempts at helping my church community worship authentically as possible. Worship as a “gesture” in which the gathered community reaches “out in hope toward transcendence.” This last phrase comes from Peter Berger’s A Rumor of  Angles: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural. When I read the phrase I thought it also nicely pointed to why someone might choose to listen to profound music as well consume entertaining music (the latter activity seemingly predominating what people think of when they think of music these days).

Which brings me back to my church community and the AGO meeting.

The AGO meeting was a morass of complexity and lack of vision and knowledge.  I listened to the representative from Casavant from my perch in the back of the room. All my fears about the direction Hope College is going with its new music building were pretty much confirmed. The building and the organ seem to have been conceived without bringing a  depth of knowledge and wisdom to the process. I understand it was quite a struggle to arrive at the solutions for the design of the organ. And there was obviously some cleverness in the final choices we saw last night. But unfortunately, they have elected to hide the pipes and put an entire French Romantic style organ under expression (this means confined into a chamber with Venetian blind like louvers to allow control of the sound). This is a very odd choice. The man from Casvant did a slide show of beautiful instruments they have installed over the world. Not one  showed pipes hidden to the extent our local people have insisted on. I took this to be a subtle point on his part (that we’re doing it wrong). I was also particularly discouraged to hear that the expected reverberation of a musical performance room was under 3 seconds. It should be a great room for small instrumental ensembles if that is the case. But organs and choral singing, not so much.

But further here in Western Michigan, every power struggle seems tainted with an odd Calvinistic materialism and reductiveness.

I sometimes picture our local leaders as burgesses very impressed with their own local life and blissfully unaware of larger perspectives. The very definition of provincial.  But maybe that’s just America these days.

It’s a good thing that I am not that invested in the future of Hope’s music building. I do wish them well and hope I’m wrong about how it will turn out.

At church I attempt to help the community do its worship with music that is transcendent as well as holding obvious meaning for and relationship to public prayer.  This is my act of faith and investment of my professional self. I continue to believe in beauty and its authenticity when it’s not clear that I or the music we are doing is connecting with the people all that well.

The best I can do sometimes is to imagine that the music is floating over the heads of the people who are gathered closer to me in the back of the church who do not seem to notice I am doing anything at the organ console and that the community is indeed listening as I play a prelude. It becomes more clear that people are connected when they themselves are making the music in singing. This is probably one of the things that encourages me the most. I feel that the experience of doing music and prayer will lead us to gestures that  are authentic, hopeful and transcendent.

Yesterday I spent some time continuing to empty files. Eileen and I decided it would be good to have the master bedroom ready for visitors by Christmas. This means getting rid of four file cabinets. I have decided to sort through and mostly throw away (recycle) stuff. The first few drawers are of my old compositions.

I spend quite a bit of mental energy trying to understand myself as a musician against the background of today’s attitudes towards music.

When it comes down to it I think of myself as a working artisan. This requires continually sharply distinguishing myself from musical understandings that are not my own.

I think I first fell in love with music by making it up. I can trace this to the young adolescent Jupe sitting alone at a church piano doodling. Although at the time I was a pretty good cornet player and probably taking piano lessons, my most vivid memories are of solitary music making.

I drifted musically quite a bit. Played trumpet throughout high school with some success, played organ and piano with pick up dance bands and rock and roll bands, and learned guitar and wrote my own songs.

At one point I decided to go back to college (only the second time I did this, more of this indecisiveness was to come). I had this romantic notion that I wanted to study composition. I wasn’t really that proficient as a pianist at the time. I moved to Delaware Ohio with the idea of studying piano to make the entrance exams at Ohio Wesleyan University and study composition there.

This I did.

Before this I had done quite a bit of writing and studying of music, mostly self-taught.

Going through manuscripts yesterday has put me a mood to reminisce a bit.

I found the actual original manuscript of the recorder duets I wrote while my first wife was in labor with my son.  I would change my whole attitude toward marriage and birth later, but at that time I was the despicable dude waiting for the baby outside the room. My friend Dave Barber sat with me on the lawn outside the hospital as we waited.

I wrote duets. As I completed each one we would play through them. At least this is the way I remember it these days. I can’t vouch too confidently for my self delusional aging memory.

Anyway, here’s the photo of the manuscript. It’s one I didn’t throw away of course.

I have managed to discard about 80% of the music I have looked at so far. Over the years I have written a lot of music, most of it for immediate use at church. Come to think of it, this was part of my attraction to church  music.

I would be in the position of having a room and musicians at my disposal. It would be up to me to come up with creative ways to use them to perform my compositions.

This is the stack I saved yesterday. I have one more drawer full to sift through. I am keeping things that have meaning for me now.  Manuscripts that I prepared prior to using software represent an awful lot of effort. It’s hard to discard ink manuscripts I labored over. So I’m not doing that.

I haven’t really pursued a coherent musical career that can be easily understood by others. It makes sense to me, however. The last couple of decades I have worked at my keyboard technique. This has been very satisfying. But composition is still my first love and I’m never that far from making up new music.

I made up a dessert yesterday.

I ground nuts, a few dried cranberries.

I pressed them on the bottom of some custard dishes. Diced up pears and spread them over the nuts. Then I boiled up some frozen blueberries with a dash of brown sugar and vanilla. Cooled this then poured it over the pears.

I had enough for four servings. Eileen and I had one each last night. I thought it tasted pretty good.

Unfortunately, the secretary forgot to put the titles of my prelude and postlude in the bulletin yesterday. They were both by the composer of the anthem, Alec Rowley.

The above bio comes from Groves online. I mentioned to the choir that the music I was playing in the prelude and postlude was by Rowley. Afterwards, Joy, the previous organist, thanked me for playing a loud prelude. I mentioned that it and the postlude were by Rowley knowing that she’s someone who would recognize (and appreciates) the composer. Still it would have been a tad more satisfying if Rowley’s name had been in the program. As it was, Joy probably wasn’t the only one who noticed the loud prelude. I picture people jolted and looking back at the eccentric aged organist and wondering what the fuck he was doing.

Rowley’s work is pretty dated. It sounds very Anglican to my ears and I would hesitate to use it outside of an Episcopalian or Anglican community. But it is well constructed and I do like doing a wide variety of styles.

Eileen spent the weekend very unhappy. I suggested we eat out and take in a movie yesterday afternoon. She readily agreed. We went and saw “Gravity.” I found it pretty weak like most new movies hit me these days. But we donned our 3d glasses and immersed ourseles in the special effects which were pretty cool since it takes place above the earth.

I think Eileen will be giving notice at work soon. I am encouraging her to do so. It will mean some belt tightening for us, but with her reduced early retirement we should be fine (as long I keep working). I’m thinking this morning we should start trimming down now if she leaves her work early next year.

I have been reading W. H. Auden’s oratorio, “For the Time Being.” This morning I finished it. I have enjoyed Auden’s wry take on the Christmas story through the lens of living in America during WWII (and a bit after).  I like how he incorporates images anachronistically reading his present onto the Christmas past. You can see this in the beginning lines of the section entitled, “The Temptation of Joseph.”

Joseph

My shoes were shined, my pants were cleaned and pressed,
And I was hurrying to meet
My own true Love:
But a great crowd grew and grew
Till I could not push my way through
Because
A star had fallen down in the street;
When they saw who I was,
The police tried to do their best.

I was surprised at the end. It ends with a section that is actually a hymn in the Hymnal 1982.

Coming at the end of Auden’s wicked little oratorio, these words have a different feeling than when I ran across them in the Hymnal.

Glancing over on my stack of books to look at and possibly read in, I see Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu.

I love convergences like that.

Just links today. I include some conservative comments I read or have bookmarked to read but reflect the points of view I often don’t agree with.

1.The ‘We Can’t Win’ Wimps Caucus – Pat Buchanan – Page 1

Buchanan ran for president a while back.

2. Republican defeat: the Tea Party should be over | Editorial | Comment is free | The Guardian Often interesting to see how we are perceived across the pond.

3. The Art of the Possible | National Review Online

National Review was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. Now they are part of the moderate camp on the right.

4.GOP Establishment Yellowskins lets taxpayers get screwed and gave Obama a blank check to spend WITHOUT LIMIT until February in Debt Ceiling Deal | Right Wing News

I think this qualifies as listening in on the echo chamber of the radical right.

5. Skull Fossil Suggests Simpler Human Lineage – NYTimes.com

Non political, but interesting to me all the same.

6. Terms of Service update – Policies & Principles – Google

I opted out of having my picture on ads. Google wasn’t happy but let me do it.

7. Hallin’s sphere of legitimate controversy

Google book link to original idea of Hallin’s spheres that define public conversation in media: consensus, legit debate and deviant.

8.Tchaikovsky Research : Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847)

My piano trio plays music by both Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn. I began wondering this week how much Tchaikovsky was influenced by Mendelssohn. This page is quotes of Tchaikovsky about Mendelssohn.

9. How the US media marginalises dissent – Opinion – Al Jazeera English

Zukermann (Rewired) footnoted this article.

10. PressThink: Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority

Another Zuckermann footnote.

11. The Pro-Discrimination Left – WSJ.com

More comment from the right, a bit more moderate than some.

12. 15 Reasons Why American Politics Has Become An Apocalyptic Mess

Now from the left.

13. Tom Friedman’s Worst Column Ever

I quit reading Friedman right after the Iraq invasion (which he supported). I skip his column usually because I think he is suspect. This is a critique from the right.

14. The Tea Party As A Religion « The Dish

Andrew Sullivan is coming from the left. He pinpoints the basis of the Tea Party White Guy Religion is hate of Obama.

15. The Myth of the Medical-Device Tax – NYTimes.com

This issue came up during the weirdness around the budget debacle. I think this take makes sense. I know, I know. This is my echo chamber.

16. Lifted From a Russian Lake, a Big, if Fragile, Space Rock – NYTimes.com

Another science story.

Eileen just got up so I’m quitting here. I have tons of links left but this is enough.

According to Google Analytics visits to my blog peaked yesterday at 37 unique hits. The three days before were more typical: 16, 19, 24 hits. I linked in the post to Facebook and I think that’s probably what did it. I also had three comments but two of them were from people who I know read this blog from time to time (Hi Rhonda and Elizabeth!). As I said in my link on Facebooger I abhor self promotion, but that link did draw 2 or 3 times my usual hits. What the heck.

I have been thinking about the distortion I have been watching in the public discussions of our recent governmental dysfunction. I make an effort to read press I disagree with. I do look for opposing points of view which make sense and are not simply partisan harangues. In fact, I don’t like partisan harangues that represent a point of view I agree with.

What is striking me most is the lack of education and coherence in most of what I read about the delay of a national budget and raising  the National debt limit. The stuff of government is both tedious and complex. This is a deadly combination in a 24 news cycle (It’s really much less than 24 hours these days). I often struggle to understand issues I am reading about. But I am especially discouraged with the radical Republicans’ complete incoherence around what they have done and advocate.

I read Huizenga’s ( my rep) Tweets and follow him on Facebook. As far as I can understand he blames everything on Obama and Democrats. His main beef is government is wasting money and needs drastic curtailment. When I have asked him directly (via Tweets) about what government is for, he doesn’t dismiss government entirely but puts governing in a back seat when it comes to his idea of reforming it.

But for Huizenga civic life is about business not the people themselves. This makes sense coming from Western Michigan which is such a strong business oriented culture. This orientation includes an extreme interpretation of Calvinist theology. If you are rich, it’s because you are good and if you are poor, it is your choice and represents an evil choice at that.

I say distortion because I’m pretty sure Calvin would shudder at this self-righteousness.  It undermines the idea of civic responsibility and a community which governs and cares for itself. Democracy has always been an experiment. But it relies on more coherence than we seem to be able to muster.

Anyway, I’m reading W. H. Auden’s fascinating oratorio libretto called “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.” This morning I was reading the section called “The Massacre of the Innocents.” Auden has Herod musing in prose for pages.

As he thinks about the decadence around him, he began to eerily remind me of the USA right now.

immense areas of barbaric night that surround … all sides, that incoherent wilderness of rage and terror

society grows savage

new prophets spring up every day to sound the old barbaric note….

Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing that rises day in, day out, from all these households…. “O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth of waterclocks and hedges. Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort madam to the Opera, help Willy with his homework, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.”

And so on. I believe Auden was living in the USA when he wrote this. Two more.

What use to me is a God whose divinity consists in doing difficult things that I cannot do or saying clever things that I cannot understand?

Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it.

Certainly education does not reach many in the USA right now.

The rest of the world watches us and shakes their heads.

I think I figured out why I have quit busking.

In his book, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology, Albert Borgmann discusses what makes a public community of celebration and how we are sorely lacking these in our society.

It may seem odd that he speaks of “communities” of celebration. But he is defining community in the way Robert Bellah (whom he cites) does:

a community of memory and of practices of commitment, and refers to a group of people who are in one another’s bodily presence and engaged in a common enterprise that is an END rather than a MEANS – Robert Bellah cited by Albert Borgmann

and celebrations are seen as

real and focal things – commanding realities not disposable ones

In  his discussion of these communities he comes up with particular instances where he talk about them. The first one he chooses is street-corner music (his term).

In Borgmann’s take on street-corner music, the community is made up of the musicians themselves and the celebration is the act of live music performing and being listened to. “The audience is usually anonymous, sporadic, and passive. But a community is not an all-or-nothing affair. The bodily presence, the skill, the engagement, and the goodwill of the musicians radiate into the  listeners and transform them to some degree.”

So far, so good. But then Borgmann begins to comment further. “Music as a celebration that is real all the way down will also sink its roots into the reality of the public space where it takes place. Celebration and place will inform one another. Thus, although street-corner music is not and should never be the result of a design thought up by the public officials….”

I stopped reading here and began thinking about Holland’s Street Performer history. It was started by interested businesses, business owners who had an interest in music themselves convinced the city council to allow musicians to play on the street.

So it really started in the sense of the community of musicians addressing the public officials. I was involved at this stage and played several pilot program instances of playing on the street.

Borgmann continues this way. “…. much can and ought to be done to make the physical environment of the city more generous to such music. It is a matter of providing space, shelter, and a little quiet in the midst of the urban commotion.”

As the Street Performer program continue to expand, the public officials set aside Thursday night and hired musicians and other performers to come and play at stations they determined. These stations got more and more crowded. The notion of who was performing what expanded to include acrobats, magicians, dancers and other street activities.

Along about this time, I began complaining to the public officials that it was difficult to do music in such close proximity to other musicians.

And the noise was not just live music. Dancers of course provided their own recordings to move to.

Also, the public officials more than once would ask musicians I was playing with to turn down. We were too loud. I remember pointing out to one of these people that the saxophone she wanted me to turn down was not miked.

Finally, the last time I played on the street was during the day one spring. I took my electric piano downtown, set up and began to play Mozart. Within minutes, a policeman asked me to turn down.

I tried to continue playing after turning down. But got frustrated, packed up and went home. I did report this to the Street Performer organization but never really had the urge to play again in the streets of Holland.

Borgmann’s observations about the need for the city to be “generous to such music” helped me understand how this local program started more like a community celebration and ended up more like a regulated commercialization. No wonder I quit.

I am feeling the distance between me and people I rub shoulders with. I think of this as partly a tradition I inherited from my Father and Grandfather Jenkins who spent their lives dealing with a similar tendency. I can see that where I live, how I think and see the world often puts me on the outside of situations, if not invisible to others. And I tend to identify with the outsider, the outlier, the weird one.

I put this to the test last night. Eileen and I were looking for something to watch on Netflix. I queued up a Charlie Chan movie. I used to love these things when I was a young man. But now I couldn’t watch it. The stereotypes, the demeaning presentation of Chinese Americans defeated me even though I appreciate a dumb detective plot. No more Charlie Chan for me.

I woke up this morning to find that my House Representative, Bill Huizenga, voted against raising the debt limit and opening the government last night. Ay yi yi. I regularly sample the radical right on sight news sources but have as yet to see a coherent defense of the position Huizenga is taking. I tweeted him and made some comments on his Facebook page to register my disagreement with his actions. On the Facebook page I noticed the wide range of civility of people who both agree with him and disagree with him.

Which leads me to my next topic, homophily.

I ran across this word in Ethan Zuckermann’s Rewire. He brought it up in a discussion of how limited the distance is between us. He started by pointing out flight patterns that demonstrate that most movement is not international but more local. He cites the work of Dr. Karl Rege and his team at the Zurich School of Applied Sciences whose video of the results is sitting on YouTube.

Then he asks the reader to imagine what it would look like if one could see the movement of each individual in the world on a time tracked video. He points out that this daily movement would include mostly short trips but that it represents the most movement of all people in the world. He says this way:

If we could overlay the trillions of trips people make on foot or by bicycle, bus, and car, the flights on Rege’s animation would disappear in a blur of local movement. The sort of transnational travel depicted on O’Sullivan’s airline route map becomes a rounding error.”

I quite like that: “a rounding error.” He is referring to a map by John O’Sullivan:

In this visualization, photographer John O’Sullivan shows every commercial airline route between two cities.

He concludes that most movement in the world is local movement. E.g. most USA air flights are domestic and under 900 miles often within the same time zone.

Then he observes:

When we encounter content on the Internet, physical distance is largely irrelevant; we seldom know whether we’re reading a web page hosted nearby or halfway around the world. But we need to consider another sort of distance, a distance between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Homophily is an organizing principle of human societies. It’s just how we are, we resemble what we are attracted to. It’s that simple. However, traversing the distance between our safe echo chamber to the unfamiliar is a necessary step to understanding our world.

Jes sayin’

The Aunt Vera situation seems to have stabilized. She remains at Nancy’s home, but professional care givers are showing up and helping the family ease her misery. Nancy seems to think that Vera is mistaking the attending in-home nurse for a doctor she once had and is accepting his help more gracefully. She is also receiving meds that are to calm her a bit. Everyone seems to think she is going to die any day now. But it remains to be seen. I am mostly concerned about the stress on Nancy and Walt who are shouldering most of this responsibility. Other family members are stepping forward now. Nancy has contacted all of the extended family she can but is mostly receiving support from her immediate family.

I wanted to give myself a day off yesterday. I gave myself the small task of preparing as I usually do the final bulletin information for a week from Sunday thus keeping us a bit ahead. To my horror, I discovered that I had somehow skipped this Sunday in my final planning of choral anthems. In other words, we had no anthem prepared for that Sunday. Yikes.

I immediately began working on figuring out what to have the choir sing that day. This turned out to consume an hour or two of effort later that day. Ah well. I enjoy this work but prefer not to be caught into it at the last minute. But these things do happen, I guess.

I now have a couple of anthems prepared to add to the choir’s list this evening for a week from Sunday. I also have three Advent anthems which I can hand out and rehearse this evening as well.

I exercised before lunch yesterday, then after lunch went to church to work on finding anthems. Then I practiced organ and came home and went on a cooking spree.

I had thawed some steaks for Eileen. I pretty much followed this recipe. First I browned onions and then cooked mushrooms to prepare the pan before grilling them. I also cut up some squash and prepared them to bake in the oven. I prepared to roast delicata squash by the recipe I used before. The other large squash I had, I cut in half, cleared of the seeds and placed half an apple in each and wrapped in tin foil. I also prepared to bake apples, coring them and putting brown sugar and spices in them.

All this time I was preheating the oven. This turned out to be a fail. The oven never reached 275 degrees even though my recipes called for a 425 degree oven.  At least that’s what the oven thermometer told me.

I put the large squash and the apples in the oven while I thought it was coming to 425 degrees and waited to do the delicata squash when the oven was hot enough.

I made wild rice and basmati rice.

Eileen called and told me she had forgotten her umbrella. It was pouring rain so I went and picked her up after work, came home and made the steak and we ate what was ready.

The oven squash and apples did in fact cook. But I had to do the delicata in a frying pan to ensure they were done.

It looks like we might need a new oven. But first I thought I would purchase a new oven thermometer and see if that’s what was malfunctioning.

Glancing over online reviews of Owen King’s book I didn’t find one that seemed to perceive the book the way I did: as an engaging romp that tells a contemporary story and drew me into the lives of the characters. It is very much a book about adolescences,  immaturity and indulgence. In other words it holds up a (good-natured) mirror to our fucked up society. The book is full of characters who are caught in the swirling pop culture of films. It also has many fanciful descriptions of movies. A few I recognized, but most sent me to the Interwebs to make sure King was making them up.

And the movies in this book also pulled me into their word-created world. I think I read somewhere where King said he found it much easier to write a movie description than he envisioned the difficulties in actually making a movie.

In the first third of the book, we meet Sam who is living in the shadow of his father Booth a larger than life actor in B movies that King based on Orson Welles. Beginning as an imaginative child, Sam has fantasized about filming what he sees and creating. As a twenty something he makes up his mind to make an independent film of his own script. The basis of his story is the idea of compacting time in the movie so that four years of attending college is crammed into scene after scene where we witness the quick passage of time in the relationships of the people he is filming. So that an arguing couple getting high flickers into one of them sitting listlessly and a bit older alone while the other might disappear. It sounds like a mildly interesting idea for a move.

King goes into some detail about the way Sam manages to organize this film. This interested me because I am fascinated by how it seems to “take a village” of people to do a film (judging from the credits I invariably sit through).

It doesn’t take long before Sam discovers that his insane AD (Assistant Director, on board because he put up a lot of money) has converted his film into a hodge podge of shots of a leering satyr like person obscenely romping for the camera in between about a third of the original movie. This insane AD has destroyed all other versions of the movie. Sam’s work is completely wasted.

So the film is made and ruined and the reader is only a third of the way into the book. The characters in the book haven’t drawn me in yet. I remember wondering where in the heck he was going to go for the rest of this book.

And this is probably the “double feature” nature of the the book. As Booth says in a key passage I have quoted here before life is like a double feature in a drive in movie. The first feature is kind of a throw away choice that doesn’t suffer too much if the light is quite right yet or you arrive late. It’s the second feature that is the real McCoy, the reason you came out to sit and eat popcorn and swat mosquitoes.

I found the rest of the book slowly engaging me into the second feature of the lives of the characters and leaving me laughing out loud more than once. The people become more complex and believable. There are shifts in their personalities as well as deaths and other things that make the whole thing believable in a cock-eyed way.

Owen King (son of Stephen whom I think he has outdone in this work) is no Anthony Burgess but I welcome his prose and clever take on what it means to be alive at this time.

Recommended.

So today is kind of a day off for me. Hope is on Fall Break. Usually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I get up and am out of the house by 8:15. I enjoy the morning walk.

This morning I found myself walking around this time as well. My Subaru has been starting more and more hesitantly. I decided to take it in to be looked at. The car place is just a few blocks away and that’s why I found myself walking in the morning sunlight this morning.

Eileen’s family is in a sort of crisis mode. She took the day off and is already gone to support her sister, Nancy.

Yesterday did not work as planned. The Hospice people were a no show. The family was expecting them to come and possibly medicate Aunt Vera enough to calm her down and move her to hospice. This didn’t happen. Instead they received a request that Aunt Vera have a chest xray and maybe even other procedures before they could admit her.

Nancy decided not to attempt to move Aunt Vera to do all that since she is really at death’s door and entirely uncooperative at this stage.

She could even have already died as I write this. I talked to Nancy on the phone yesterday and she said that she was just going to keep her where she was.

This kind of thing takes a toll on us old people as we have to take care of even older people whom we love. I had a lot of help with my father’s death and my mother’s breakdown, but it still was difficult.

I was going to type some reading notes on Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology this morning but I ran out of time. Sometimes I type in my reading notes and then use them (hopefully sparingly) here in my blog. I wanted to talk about Borgmann’s ideas a little bit this morning. So I guess I’ll just touch briefly on it.

Borgmann is working toward an ethical-philosophical critique of the impact of technology on our lives.

He sees two kinds of things or realities.

“The first constitutes globally ‘a universe that speaks to humans.’ Locally it comes to the fore in any object that conveys ‘meaning through its own inherent qualities’ and’the active contribution of the thing itself to the meaning process.’ It is a kind of reality, however, that the authors [he is quoting from] find to be rarely acknowledged in their extensive interviews.”

Let me stop here and say that he is talking about concrete things, things that he classifies as “commanding realities.” Lest this sound too obscure, he talks about music and compares musical instruments as examples of commanding realities

to listening devices such as CD players or stereos which are examples of “disposable” things or reality.

He is drawing from the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton.

I think that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is also the author of the book, Flow, which I have dabbled in a bit.

I couldn’t quickly find an online connection between these two books, but how many people have the name Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and publish in related areas?

I know I didn’t put a definition of “disposable reality” here, but I think I will just close with a succinct little paragraph from Borgmann which sums it up well.

“In sum, material culture in the advanced industrial democracies spans a spectrum from commanding to disposable reality. The former reality calls forth a life of engagement that is oriented within the physical and social world. The latter induces a life of distraction that is isolated from the environment and from other people…”

Excellence vs. banality
deep vs. shallow
communal vs. individualist
celabratory vs. consumerist

Borgman offers the last few pairs of terms as markers toward further understanding not definitive comparisons.

Instead of getting a day off yesterday, I had a day full of activity. Eileen drove up to Whitehall to see her Mom and give her sister,Nancy, moral support.  Nancy and her husband Walt have been tending to the rapidly failing Aunt Vera. Aunt Vera just turned 101 years old in September and unsurprisingly her mind is confused making her difficult to care for. Not long ago she refused to get out of the car to go in to see the doctor. Also when Eileen’s brother, Dave, took over and drove her to the Emergency Room Vera continued to refuse to leave the car. Forcing her into the ER would constitute legal assault.

Today Hospice is coming. They should be able to help. Plus they will be moving Aunt Vera to a hospice care facility  today or tomorrow.

In the meantime, Nancy and Walt are caring for Aunt Vera and it is traumatic to say the least.

For my part, Eileen and I went to the Farmers Market before she left. Then I had my ballet class mentioned yesterday.  I have been despondent this week. I consoled myself working on transcribing a Bach Viola da Gamba sonata into Finale. I’m hoping I can convince my cellist to read through it with me. It’s one of the Bach sonatas where he composed the right hand for the continuo player. Practice was at that time to write only the solo part and the bass line with indications of how to make up the harmonies. When Bach writes out the right hand one has a lovely little trio between the soloist, the bass line and the right hand of the keyboard player.

I went to church to practice and prepare for this morning. Then I played the afternoon class. Came home. Exercised. Made a martini and sat in the back yard and read.

1. The G.O.P. Role in the Fiscal Crisis – NYTimes.com

This is a link to letters in response to an article. I particularly liked two of them.

Susan Karpatkin from Bethesda writes:

“I am one Democrat who would be happy to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress. The Republicans have stated their opening position for negotiation. They are ready to reopen the government if we defund the Affordable Care Act. Here is mine.

 I am ready to reopen the government if we add a public option to the Affordable Care Act. And while we are negotiating, I also demand a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour, a law that restricts chief executives and other managers to no more than 100 times the wage the lowest-paid person in their company receives, public financing of campaigns, and longer hours at polling places”

Michael Kraft writes:

“

The stance of some Republican members of Congress and others is not surprising, coming from the party that denies the human impact on global warming, is home to so many creationists and “birthers,” and cuts spending for research and education.

Gut feelings and denial of inconvenient facts are more important to them than rational analysis. Since 1968 I have worked for three Republican members of Congress and have covered the Hill for a major news agency, and this is the worst Congress I’ve seen.”

I know that many on the right consider the NYT a liberal echo chamber (including apparently Supreme Court Justice Scalia). But I think it is read by educated people and provides the best information in the USA.

Scalia’s Echo Chamber – NYTimes.com

2. Nate Silver on the U.S. government shutdown – FiveThirtyEight

I put this link on Facebook. It’s a good analysis that doesn’t hesitate to point out what’s possible to know at this point.

3. The Final Insult in the Bush-Cheney Marriage – NYTimes.com

A peek inside the administration that wreaked so much havoc we are still in the midst of dealing with.

4. West Bank – Settlers Said to Deface a Mosque – NYTimes.com

“Settlers have attacked Palestinian communities 586 times so far this year, up from 370 in all of 2012,”

I’m working the 2013 Michigan Dance Festival today being hosted at Hope College.

It’s a one day event of classes and performances.  A while back one of the teachers I work with at Hope asked me if I would play a couple of classes she is teaching. I have enjoyed working with this teacher and said I would.

Yesterday I was going to ask her if I should add these two hours to my time card, when she handed me a check for this work. Apparently she was paying me out of her fee so she could have a pianist for her classes. The check was for $100 which is about right.

Once again we artists are taking care of each other since we are so invisible to others.

But it is in contrast to how wedding and funeral people often treat me. Even after a lifetime of playing for funerals and weddings I still find myself chasing people down and asking to be paid after the fact from time to time.  The etiquette is to pay a musician immediately after services of this kind are rendered. But this is kind of futile when people have difficulty seeing my work. Literally seeing what I do as a skill and something a human does instead of a recording.

I was reminded of this in a passage by Albert Borgmann in his book, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology.

He is using Cool Whip as an example of how technology impacts us.

“To grasp the inconspicuous and elusive quotidianity of the technological culture, consider Cool Whip. It is a nondairy whipped topping. This labored generic description for what is simply artificial whipped cream bespeaks a residual uneasiness in our habits of replacing natural or traditional things with technologically reconstituted items.”

He then goes on for a page or two to develop this example and how it illustrates stuff.

Then he writes the passage I want to quote.

“Even if the pattern of Cool Whip is seen in all the technological devices and implements that surround us, the most troubling extension of it is yet to be recognized. The availability, the freshness, the uniform perfection and the absence of demands that we value in Cool Whip we seek in persons as well, and being aware of how widely Cool Whip persons are appreciated, we seek to restyle ourselves in that image. Accordingly, as we remake our personality and appearance to lend them the appeal of availability, we foreshorten our existence into an opaque, if glamorous, surface and replace the depth of tradition and rootedness of life by a concealed and intricate machinery of techniques and therapies.”

This reminded me of how the technology of recording has affected musicians. The “uniform perfection” of recordings which have been manipulated and tweaked has many musicians underestimating their own contribution (see Kenny Werner’s descriptions in his Effortless Mastery where he talks about being miserable at listening to recordings as a young uptight excellent player).

Of course it is this technology that makes so much music available to me and other listeners which is a good thing.

But the inevitable disconnect between actual humans and the making of music causes people sometimes not to see us players and composers, to not know we are doing something that is beautiful and the result of years of preparation and training, to not think that what we do is as much as skill as someone who caters a wedding.

The good part is that music is its own reward. At least for me it is. This is true because I have shelter, food and people who love me back. So the luxury of making music is something I value but know I can value it because the rest of my life is so good (“Music is not the cake. It’s the icing on the cake”).

I noticed yesterday that five men were in my head throughout the day. They of course were not the only ones but since they are all composers of profound music they share an impact on me.

First I played through a variation from the Goldberg Variations of Bach that I’m pretty sure I had never played through before (Variation 26 below).

At least I don’t remember doing so (thank you, Alzheimers).

Then in the afternoon, my piano trio met. It’s the first time the three of us have been together for a couple of weeks. I canceled one week. The second week the violinist didn’t show. But yesterday we were all there.

We began with Fauré. First a trio arrangement of his song, Après un rêve.

It’s the length of an art song (which is not very long).

Then we moved on to his piano trio.  This is an intriguing composition to me. The accompaniment patterns in the piano never repeat the way one might expect. There is always a subtle and telling change. The themes in the two movements we played through yesterday are beautiful, unique and to my ear very modern sounding (more like virtuoso popular music than “clangy” modern).

We finished with the first  movement of Beethoven’s C minor piano trio. We have been rehearsing this one on and off for a while. I have noticed that my keyboard technique is kicking in more and more. This is helpful because the piano part to this trio is a handful.

Earlier in the day, I had rehearsed my prelude and postlude for this Sunday. We are singing a little Baroque Italian thing for the anthem. I thought it might be fun to use Italian organ composers.

The prelude is a toccata by Frescobaldi.

The postlude is a ricercar by Andrea Gabrieli, uncle to the more famous Giovanni Gabrieli.

Playing the music I did yesterday was like having a conversation with or maybe overhearing intimately other minds. Over and over I feel privileged to come into contact with people who have lived and breathed long before I was born. Bach’s intricate twists and turns in his Goldberg Variations. Fauré’s elegant, beautiful, disturbing comments in his trio written late in his life. Beethoven’s stormy full throated ideas booming in his trio movement. Then the careful Renaissance world of interesting small capsules of meaning in the back and forth working out of beautiful musical and rhythmical ideas.

When playing early Renaissance music I remember that the original music when played or sung by groups of musicians was never written in score. Instead each player had his own part to sort of work out with other players without the regularity of numbered measures.

There was never a “start at Letter A” when there were essentially no  measures and ideas were as long as the composer made them and often overlapped in marvelous ways.

The independence of the voices was such that composers like Palestrina disdained to compose separate voices in score. Instead they would write out each line separately.

This does not really apply to the keyboard music I am playing since I know it was written in score and comes a generation later than Palestrina. But still I think it’s a cool way to think about the interplay between the voices.