Tonight, I’m hoping to do choir rehearsal in the church. On Sunday, the concrete at the back of the church, in front of the choir area was still exposed. The plan is to return carpet to this area. I would love it if it was ready by today, but I will have to deal with whatever stage they are in.

I’m also thinking it might be wise to not have the choir process until the new organ is up and working. I will be leading the singing in the room from the piano. Believe it or not there was a bit of delay between the front and back of the room before enhancing the acoustics. I’m expecting the entire aural environment to be different and require adaptation. Doing this with an upright piano from the back of the room (shoved into a little handy niche to make more room in the aisle which will probably deaden the sound) might be challenging, so why do it, if I don’t have to? Rev Jen and I will discuss this today.

I’m also expecting to have to move all my own furniture back in place. this mostly means putting the chairs in the choir area and then linking them up with the stupid connectors that I haven’t used in a while. The connector would provide a little pocket to either side of the seat as well as make a row of chairs effectively a pew.

All I really want to do is make music.

I didn’t get to the organ yesterday. Eileen got up late and delayed her breakfast till after 10:30. I like to breakfast with her, so I waited. But we wanted to get over to Mom’s to see how the new chair the rest home had provided was working out. We waited until after lunch was served there. In the meantime, I worked on submitting music for the bulletin for this Sunday. Then put Mom’s current selection of read books into the google doc I keep for that purpose. We went to the library and returned the old Mom books, got new Mom books, and stopped by her room.

She needed something to put her feet up on. I had anticipated this might be the case, but wanted to consult with her before problem solving. Her old chair was still in the room. We stopped by the front desk at the nursing home and requested its removal. It was gone by the time we got back.

We scoured a used furniture store and “Bibles for Mexico” for an ottoman. No luck. Eileeen then said we could loan Mom the foot stool she was using. So we stopped by the house and grabbed it. Mom seemed pleased with that.

We then drove the Olds to the car place, left it for them to fix, and walked home.

A lot of the day was gone by then. The car place called mid afternoon and said the trunk on the Olds was fixed. They agreed to look at my dying Subaru and either pronounce it dead or safe for in town driving.

I did manage to get time on guitar and piano yesterday, but there weren’t enough hours to add organ before martini time.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I am almost done reading The Sellout by Paul Beatty. This is a romp of a book. I have found it an antidote to both Trump stuff and the religiosity that permeates my little town. Last night I read this paragraph to Eileen. I was surprised when she didn’t get the Betty Boop stuff. Maybe you won’t either but I think the whole paragraph is genius.

The setup is that the main characters in the book are attending the L.A. Festival of Forbidden Cinema and Unabashedly Racist Animation.

I like Betty Boop. She has a nice body, is free-spirited, loves jazz, and apparently opium, too, because in a hallucinogenic short titled “Ups and Downs,” the moon is auctioning off a Depression-era Earth to the other planets. Saturn, an old, bespectacled Jewish orb complete with bad teeth and a heavy Yiddish accent, wins and rubs his hands greedily. “I gottum. I gottum da whole vorld. Mein Gott,” he gloats, before removing gravity from the Earth’s core. It’s 1932 and Max Fleischer’s metaphorical Jew is making an already chaotic global situation even worse. Not that Betty cares, because in a world where cats and cows fly, and the rain falls up, priority number one is to keep your skirt line from ascending to the heavens and exposing your form-fitting panties. And who’s to say that Ms. Boop isn’t a member of the tribe? For the next sixty minutes a few drunken, droopy-feathered Native Americans fail to catch the Warner Bros. rabbit, much less assimilate. A Mexican mouse tries to outwit the gringo pussycat, so he can sneak across the border and steal the queso. A seemingly endless lineup of African-American cats, crows, bullfrogs, maids, crap shooters, cotton pickers, and cannibals act a gravelly-voiced Looney Tunes fool to the strains of “Swanee River” and Duke Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.” Sometimes a shotgun blast or dynamite explosion turns a nominally white character like Porky Pig into a gunpowder-colored minstrel. Bestowing on him honorary-nigger status, which allows him to sing merry melodies like “Camptown Races” over the closing credits with impunity. The program ends with Popeye and Bugs Bunny taking turns single-handedly winning World War II by flummoxing bucktoothed, four eyed, gibberish-speaking Japanese soldiers with giant mallets and geisha subterfuge. Finally, after Superman, supported by gongs and a cheering audience, pulverizes the Imperial Navy into complete submission, the lights come back on. After two hours of sitting in the dark laughing at unmitigated racism, in the brightness the guilt sets in. Everyone can see your face, and you feel like your mother caught you masturbating.”

A little something for everyone in that paragraph, eh? I can see why Sarah Silverman blurbs on the back: “The Sellout is brilliant. Amazing. Like demented angels wrote it.”

I think I owe you, dear reader, a poem after that. This is one of two that hit me this morning.

Even the Awful by Stephen Dunn

Yesterday for the the first time in several years, I picked up my guitar and practiced for about a half hour or so. I used my classic so the nylon strings wouldn’t be too hard on my soft fingers. The goal would be to build up enough callouses on my left hand that I could comfortably perform. Yesterday I mostly played easy classic guitar music and a couple of my own compositions. The fingers remembered everything, but they are a bit stiffer with age.  I also have an urge to pick up the banjo, but I’m going to wait until my callouses are starting to form.

I think I might have been inspired when we were cleaning out the front porch yesterday. I found a collection of music for Bach arranged for the guitar that I purchased right about the time I quit playing guitar. Also, I have been thinking about how much fun it would be to do different music styles in recitals at church. It would be nice to have my guitar/banjo chops back in shape so if I had an idea about using the instruments they would be easy to schedule.

I’m still thinking about possible names for my series at Grace.

grace mix
graceful mix
grace notes (Eileen thought of this one. I wonder if it’s already being used somewhere at church)
live in the back
sanctuary music

As you can see I’m kicking around ideas. Suggestions welcome!

I decided yesterday that I will perform two of Phillip Glass’s etudes for piano Sunday.

The anthem Sunday is by a living composer, so it would be nice to have a prelude and postlude that sort of match that.  The postlude etude, No. 11, timed in at over 8 minutes yesterday. That’s kind of long for a postlude but what the fuck.

Eileen and I talked to people at Mom’s nursing home yesterday about furniture. I had the idea that they might have a chair for Mom to sit in instead of climbing over her non-functional recliner. The woman I talked to said she would instantly look into providing Mom with a temporary solution. Later in the day, she called to say that they had found one and already put it Mom’s room. Cool.

After practicing guitar and piano, I did manage another hour on organ yesterday. This time I worked only on Bach. I’m going to learn the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor since two parishioners have said that they would like to hear me play it on the new organ. I take requests when they’re any where near the kind of music I want to play. So I practiced that yesterday. I have been practicing the famous rubato beginning to this piece in strict time. This was a suggestion in the historical edition I recently purchased edited by Quentin Faulkner. It turns out to not to be all that great an edition. It contains the Orgelbüchlein and a few pieces one of which is that piece.

I ordered a hundred dollars worth of used music yesterday from my former teacher, Craig Cramer. It included a piece for violin, cello, and organ by William Boyce with parts included. Woo hoo!

I seem to have broken the trunk latch on Mom’s car yesterday.  I took a load of junk from the porch to Bibles for Mexico and couldn’t it to latch. We have an appointment to have it looked at today.

The fun never stops.

The music went really well yesterday. The piano trio played two movements by CPE Bach. We know these very well but prepared them carefully. This was probably a good thing, since after church the violinist told me that she really had to work at CPE that day which she found unusual. I responded that she played very well and that the pieces came off well so it was a good thing that she worked so hard. I suspect she is missing worshiping with her home community. Next week she will be able to since we are moving back upstairs and she had only committed herself to helping out while we were downstairs.

We did the famous Bairstow setting of “The King of Love” yesterday for an anthem. This piece relies on the organ accompaniment. You can see how Bairstow was thinking of pairing a good choral sound with a typical romantic organ. I, however, accompanied it on piano. It became a slightly different piece that way. I think it was cool and even improved a little bit this way, dragging this stuffy English piece into the 21st century arena, praying in the basement of a liberal little church in a hostile land.

After resting up a bit and making the daily visit to my Mom with Eileen, I set off to get some badly needed organ practice. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting organ. I managed a couple of good solid hours yesterday, mostly with Bach.

This morning I listened to part of a “Between the Covers” podcast of a February interview with Ursula K. Leguin (some I read and admire).

Here’s an link.

I found myself pondering words she read from an essay in her new book, Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016.

The essay was called “The Operating Instructions.”

Her ideas about “home” struck me. Here’s an excerpt.

************************************************************************************

This, of course, is how I see it. My home is the conversation I experience as I play music, make it up, read books, and simply sit and think. The voices in the books, music, and ideas are my home.

So spending two hours with Bach at the organ is spending time; privileged, lucky time; with the musical ideas of his mind.

This morning I continued my reading of poetry. I  have less than seventy pages to read of Amiri Barak’s 528 page, SOS: Poems 1961-2013.

I laughed out loud when I read this couplet this morning:

“The Father The Son and The Holy Ghost is a Joke
What happened to the Mother, Fools!”

From the poem, “Why it’s quiet in some churches.”

or these lines

Just Buy! Sell! Completely Free (shudder when you hear
them say that word) Free! to squander our lives for their
gain. Paying no taxes, new mix-match Himmlers like Tom
Ass Clarence and his criminal wife praying to their non existent
God which they count as they step through the blood giggling
“Citizens United” the scalding song of vampires mumbling
all over the world as they come to evict us from our homes
and our schools, public education is on their hit list as well.

from the poem, “What’s that? Who is this in them old Nazi clothes? Nazi’s dead!”

Baraka died in 2014, but this poem could have been written now. And I do love: “Tom Ass Clarence.”

My copy of Derek Walcott’s Omeros arrived in the mail yesterday. I read a chapter in it last night. This morning I got up, did dishes and Greek, then I read poetry for a while. In addition to two books of Walcott poems, I am reading books of poetry by the poets, Hayden Carruth (Last Poems), Marianne Boruch (Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing), Ishion Hutchinson (House of Lords and Commons), and Stephen Dunn (Whereas). I find it a pleasant way to start the day.

I did manage to walk almost three miles yesterday while Eileen was in Whitehall. That was good. Eileen is still sleeping but will probably get up soon. Then we will have breakfast and go to church. I am going to have stop here so that I can be prepared for church.

This morning Eileen and I had breakfast and then she left to drive to Whitehall. There she will do her mom’s hair and fix waffles for her. She left looking forward to that. I am hoping to get some serious relaxing in today. We didn’t talk about it, but I think we both realized I could use a day of solitude.

By the end of the day yesterday, I was once again frazzled. After blogging, I called a local furniture store to see about replacing my Mom’s recliner. Her present chair is not working properly. Its footrest is no longer responding to her hand controls and refuses to fold down so she can easily get out of the chair. I had to push it down by hand to let her up this week. It’s also very worn. The salesman found our old order and said he would call me back after he had found out if we could order the same chair again. The funds are coming from Mom’s money.

I have been thinking about my meeting with Peter and Nick. I wonder if our aesthetics have moved away from each other. They are both excellent, highly refined musicians. I, on the other hand, value my own eccentric aesthetic of eclecticism. I think they enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. I just wonder if they have private reservations that I awaken with my crazy talk. This is probably me just being paranoid.

Since Nick has given me permission to drop by and play the harpsichord, I am looking forward to making time to do that next week.

Since Eileen has our only working car (the Subaru is probably headed for the junkyard and the Mini is stored in the garage with its insurance turned off), I am on foot for today. I’m not sure what I will do, but if I leave the house I will definitely get some walking in and that is a good thing.

I keep thinking about how to do recitals at my church. I am thinking of loosely shooting for one a month. I would like to do the first one with my choir and my piano trio, probably in late May or early June. At that time I will want to have a date and time for the second one so that I can publicize it at the first. I am thinking about some sort of umbrella name for these concerts. Music at Grace? The Listener’s workshop? I would like to explore getting some organizational help from parishioners, especially regarding establishing a “friends of Music at Grace” or whatever.

I basically see three kinds of programs at this point. First, the ones that I put together myself with a variety of players doing a wide variety of music. I want the first one in May or June to be like that.  I have thought about calling it from X to Y, with X being the earliest composer (Frescobaldi) and Y being the most recent (Philip Glass?): “From Frescobaldi to Glass” And I definitely plan  on performing at least one of my own compositions. I also want these type of programs to include improvisation.

Secondly, I see bringing in a local musician to do an entire program. I would like to explore local college students airing out pieces on these kinds of programs and would like to pay them something ($50). Also, I would like to see local professionals  giving recitals. I would also like to pay them ($200 or more).

Thirdly, I would like to host more prominent musicians who are playing recitals nationally and are not local (for the most part). In order to attract them, I would have to be clever about piggy backing a gig when they are in the area. I am thinking of paying them a bit more.

Anyway, I’m still sort of kicking it around. I do want to stay flexible as I do this.

Predatory journals recruit fake editor : Nature News & Comment

This article is the source for the New York Times report I linked yesterday. I haven’t read it all the way through.

Werner Herzog’s QUEEN OF THE DESERT Gets a Trailer | Film Pulse

Herzog is an interesting director. This looks kind of goofy, but I still would like to see it.

Two New Choral-Music Recordings – The New Yorker

This popped up on my Google news feed this morning.

I love it when I learn about music I don’t know. The following video is an older one, but it seems to be some of the music described in the article performed by the group in the article. I think this is lovely.

I have been listening to this group this morning as I write this blog. I am now a fan.

The following piece was mentioned in the article as being a highlight at the concert. I like the composer, Nico Muhy. Plus the composer of the video before is Caroline Shaw. These are people whom I think are making excellent new original music. Jes saying.

I just got back from my shrink appointment with Dr. Birky. Talking to him, I realized how much has happened in my life the last week. It was last Friday when Eileen got her loom (good stress) and fell (bad stress). On Saturday we decided to bow out of meeting with friends in Flint to celebrate their recent official marriage after 39 years of relationship (disappointment/aging issues = bad stress). The Sunday Eucharist went well. (good performances = good stress). Emails back and forth between me and the jazz trumpet player about Monday’s funeral were happening through this period. This was bad stress on those days, but it was  a relief when he sent me the simple sheet music for the funeral. The funeral was stressful. In addition to my regular stuff I drove up to babble at my old friends, Nick and Peter.  Besides feeling sheepish at my inability to successfully stifle my passionate side, that was good stress.  I do like those men!

There’s much more I could write about but you get the idea. One surprising example of good stress is that I was so hyped up after chatting with Nick and Peter Thursday and my piano trio rehearsal I didn’t sleep well last night.

I spent a good part of the night fantasizing about coming up with unique recitals at my church that would be similar in scope to what I used to do in coffee shops. This was definitely good stress even though I lost sleep.

So. My life is good! There’s no doubt about that.

A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals – The New York Times

Paying to be published in an open journal! I’m interested in making conversations open, but there’s troubling stuff happening and being reported in this article.

Death on a Prison Bus: Extradition Companies’ Safety Improvements Lag – The New York Times

The free market at work, eh?

A 17-year-old student spotted an error in NASA’s International Space Station data — Quartz

I love this!

I had a productive day yesterday. Jen, my boss, and I had a lengthy conversation ranging from a post mortem on Monday’s funeral to discussing music chairs and new choir robes for Grace. We decided to not purchase new choir chairs for the church. Instead we will wait until after the organ is in place to evaluate. We are planning for risers at this time. Just exactly how they will be constructed remains to be seen after we see the space that is available for them. It would be silly to buy chairs and then find they didn’t fit well on risers.

We did decide however to purchase 25 musician chairs.

They will be like the one pictured above. The idea is that we will put these in the choir room. Since I have about 15 members, that means I have 5 extra chairs for additional instrumentalists both in the choir room and simultaneously be able to use 5 chairs in the church.

Plus we are going to get new more Episcopalian choir robes. Jen came to our rehearsal last night and gave the choir a pep talk, updated them, then told them about the impending robe purchase.

Speaking of that rehearsal, it went really well. I took pains with planning it, arranging the material in ways that would help the choir. We started a new anthem: Exultate justi by Viadana. I had a pronunciation guide and translation ready for them. One soprano led us through some vocal exercises she has learned from her private teacher using a straw.

It’s not often I come out of rehearsals feeling as good as I did last night. As usual with music it’s probably directly related to preparation.

This morning after breakfast, I’m hopping into a car and driving to Grand Haven to meet with my long time colleagues, Nick Palmer and Peter Kurdziel. We don’t have much of an agenda. Just getting together to shoot the shit for a couple hours. I plan to pick their brains a little about harpsichord music, French classical music and some other topics. I will play Nick’s harpsichord while there since he has asked me to play on Messiah sing along in a few weeks. I get the idea it might not be the best harpsichord. It’s a Sabathil. Nick says it has an odd touch. I was hoping it was a good one, since the possibility that I could some quality time on it is much stronger than ever playing Hope College’s fine instrument. But I’ll know more after this morning.

While Gorsuch was testifying, the Supreme Court unanimously said he was wrong

I have been losing patience with my fellow liberals around the analysis of Gorsuch’s nomination. I find myself turning them off when they exhibit such ignorance of law and its parameters. Sure, Gorsuch’s “aw shucks” performance was well coached and intentional. Remember Bork? We shoot down people who lower the mask too far. However, he has a long paper trail that it seems that both sides are cherry picking. I think he’s going to be nominated and confirmed. I hope he has as much integrity as he seems to. Unfortunately, the proof is in the pudding.

BBC – Culture – Born in the USA: Misunderstood songs

The questions is misunderstood by whom? The fact that George Will misunderstood “Born in the USA” is singularly unsurprising. I didn’t recognize every song. This is kind of a goofy article.

I don’t particularly think  of myself as elderly at the age of 65. However, I am grateful to have lived this long. Since I have been a pretty heavy consumer of alcohol and haven’t taken care of my body as well I could have, I didn’t necessarily expect to arrive at my sixties in such relatively good shape.

I like the phrase Wendell Berry used in his poem, VII,  on today’s Writer’s Almanac: “The stern privilege of being old.”

What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worked
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.

I think Wendell Berry was much more physically active than I have been. I don’t think I was a “wonder,” but I do think that I have and continue to be privileged in a manner I have not earned.

Another poem I read this morning commented on old age. Stephen Dunn seems to be writing on his seventieth birthday.

I think Stephen Dunn captures something about being older that I treasure.

I like my new header for the blog. While figuring out the “widget” that daughter Elizabeth pointed me to I discovered I could upload a picture for the header picture. Cool. I think that I will update that from time to time and that will satisfy my vanity/narcissism.

Yesterday I went into a bit of a mental stall. When this happens the day flies by and I see that I’m not accomplishing much more than taking up some space. It’s also largely  involuntary. But it is recuperative.

I spent some time this morning updating some pages here. Putting that picture up at the top of my website inspired me to look over some of the other links and look for outdated info and broken links. Yesterday I had 43 hits according to Google Analytics. I like to think that people can come here and find what they are interested in.

Despite the stall yesterday  I did some work on updating some of my scores. Currently I’m keeping scores I am working on here on my laptop. I need to transfer them to a hard drive. I need to pick up a new hard drive since the one I have been clumsily using for saving things is filling up. I put up a couple new scores on my free mostly original sheet music page.  I try to think about music composition at least once a week. Updating scores and making sure they are saved and organized seems to be a compositional activity I can engage in even when burned out.

Eileen is feeling less and less sore. We were lucky. Even though we aren’t that old, falls can be a problem as you age.

Many thanks to daughter Elizabeth for showing me the widget for a profile pic on my blog. As you can probably see, I have changed it to today’s pic above.  (Caveat: This doesn’t seem to work on phone type apps…. it’s at the bottom of the entire frame) My niece Cindy Cosway once remarked that she liked it when I kept  my profile pic on Fecesbook up to date. I gathered that she found it helpful to see my aging mug and think that was what I looked like now. Anyway, I haven’t made a decision to continue doing things one way or the other. That’s the beauty of the interwebs and having daughters who can help their old man with tech. [Post script. I have removed the widget entirely and updated the header with a pic. Still a work in progress obviously, but I’m glad to get rid of that orangey pattern thingo that came with the template.]

Yesterday devolved into a bit of a stressful Monday for me. One thing Dr. Birky has helped me understand about myself is how sensitive I am. This was certainly the case yesterday. I was a bit rattled to perform with a jazz musician I didn’t know very well except by reputation. I know that I am an unconventional musician (to say the least) who doesn’t fit well into categories. In addition, I’m at peace with my own understandings about music and improvisation, understandings that rarely rhyme with other musicians’s understandings.

As I was saying here yesterday, my improvisations are a mismash of the musics of my life. I am usually proud of them.

And as I mentioned to Eileen when I do jazz I tend to be playful, not careful the way academic jazzers can be. I’m thinking of chord voicings here. It’s similar to improvising baroque figured bass. I think both are interesting, but neither are skills I want to develop. If you are a listener, I like to think my improvs buy diazepam online uk london will take you somewhere. And honestly my brand of improvising does seem to be something that I get comments on frequently, even from academic musicians.

After yesterday’s funeral, the jazz trumpet player said that more church musicians should be able to sit down and do what I did with him yesterday. This is probably as close to a compliment as this dude gets. Mostly I had weird anxiety going into this gig. The deceased was a jazz aficionado. There were musicians present as well as eccentric bow tied intellectuals who were probably jazzers. But mostly I was off balance beforehand. I acquitted myself satisfactorily on the tunes the trumpet player had chosen. I invited him to play more with me in the prelude, but he demurred.

It ended up being a emotionally charged funeral. I had moments of being over whelmed and quietly weeping. This happens to me from time to time at funerals. As Eileen later pointed out it’s  difficult to watch other people grieve, especially family. My trumpet player referred to the dead man as a dear friend and I think he was doing his share of grieving.

Earlier in the day, Eileen could not find my  W2 form from church.

I overreacted and didn’t really calm down about this until I had found the form just before the funeral. Eileen and I agreed that at our next weekly “check-in” we would work out some ground rules about protecting over sensitive jupe. Hopefully I can avoid stressing myself out that way. Hey. It could happen.

One of the things I don’t like about this particular Word Press blog template is that there is no profile pic on the first page. It seems to me when I go to other pages I like seeing a pic of the person. It helps me know I’m in the right place and also seems kind of internet honest.

Speaking of honest, I have been thinking about Neil Gorsuch this morning. Hearings for his Supreme court nomination begin today. I have his book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia from the library. I have read a few pages into it. Today I skipped past the clear description and history of law around this issue to chapter 9 where he proposes his reason against legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia.

Gorsuch prose and thoughts are clear and well wrought. He obviously has a brilliant mind. I wonder about the connection between intelligence and integrity. I hope that Gorsuch has integrity. My guess is he probably does. I want to watch a bit of the hearings today to see him in action. I think he will probably get the vacated Scalia seat. I have watched Supreme Court justice nominations before including the hearings for Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. I don’t need to watch the entire thing (although I did watch a lot of the Clarence Thomas hearing).

We subscribe to Comcast which allows viewers to access C Span via their subscription. C Span is funded by cable TV. I haven’t found a good free streaming site which is troubling since it provides continual access to Congress as well as other fascinating events. But we have it queued up this morning so that when the Gorsuch hearings begin we can watch.

This afternoon I have to play with a local trumpet player at the funeral at my church. He apparently was in contact with the deceased recently who requested he play at his funeral. I think he has a jazz/classical background. He has been emailing about this gig. We are going to do several pieces together: “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” “Take Five,” “Roses of Picardy,” and “When the Saints.”  Yesterday as I was practicing these tunes, I told myself I should be able to play “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “When the Saints” by ear in the keys that are good for the trumpet guy.

Then I realized I was asking myself to do something that was not necessary. When playing by ear I often make mistakes. Why set myself up for that? I wondered. So I’m going to put together charts for those two tunes in the keys the trumpet player mentioned in his email. Also I plan to have my Real Book handy if he wants to do some playing in the prelude together in addition to these tunes. I fear he might be a bit of an academic jazz snob. He insisted on using his own version of “Take Five” because “The Real Book is wrong.” Yikes.

Anyway, I plan to be prepared to accompany him and include him as much as possible today. I also plan to play some of the usual excellent music I play at funerals and wedding: Bach and Mozart.  I’m not an academic jazzer. I improvise, but actually attempt to play what I hear which is probably more poppy/rock and roll/classical or some lame combination of stuff.

POSTSCRIPT The trumpet player just emailed me charts for those two tunes. Bless his heart! That will make my day go better!

I had a decent amount of energy for work today. I’m not sure how it would have been had we gone to Flint yesterday, probably worse. Eileen is still sore. We didn’t walk to church as we usually do so she could still make it to church this morning.

I cooked yesterday.It was therapy as much as anything. I made this recipe for a second time. This time i took some pictures just for the heck of it.

The French have a term, mise en place,  which in cooking means beginning with all ingredients in place. This is a recipe for Sweet Potato Dahl.

I remembered this method of dicing onion which I haven’t used for a while. It’s mostly good for when you want quite a bit of diced onion.

The recipe calls for chili peppers. Yesterday I substituted Pablano pepper. I keep them in the house because I love them and use then in cooking quite a bit. They are not too spicy.

Mark reminded me about the neat trick of shaking the skin off of garlic. I think using martini shakers was his idea. I have two shakers. This is now my official garlic shaker.

You have to chop up the sweet potato.

I like to put pre-measure spices in a custard dish. It’s also convenient to put the pablano, garlic and an additional splash of canned diced jalapeno (which are spicy) in a little dish as well.

Of course measuring out the lentils is a good idea. That’s all the pics I took because I only took pictures of things I thought looked cool. The recipe itself is not that beautiful. However, it is good eating. It is actually the dish to pass I contemplated taking to the Flint get together. But it turned out to be therapy for a tired old man instead.

Listen to Mozart played on Mozart’s VERY OWN piano – Classic FM

This is wild.

BBC – Future – The invention of ‘heterosexuality’

Bookmarked to read. I find that the way I see sexuality is very different from the stereotypes. I have always thought of it as a continuum phenomenon. That ‘heterosexuality’ was invented is not surprising to me. What is surprising is how many people seem to fall into weird (to me) typecasting behavior as connected to a sexual identity of one group or another.

Speaking of this, recently I met an interesting person who didn’t fall on a clear male or female continuum. She was identifying as woman, that was clear. What struck me was how she relaxed and came out of her shell more after seeing a human rights bumper sticker on a car I was using.

It made me realize how important these signals of acceptance are right now. Time to get some more bumper stickers.

Eileen just got up and she seems to be feeling much better. I’m still deciding whether to try to pull off a Flint trip today plus prep for tomorrow. My energy pie feels small this morning. Moving the loom involved a lot of physical work for this old guy even with lots of help. We also walked over a half mile to a hardware store to get sturdy straps to hold the loom in place during the trip. That’s where Eileen fell.

This morning I heard a snippet of Tom Waits’s “Way down in the hole” at the end of “On the Media.” This made me realize how helpful his music is in the Trump era. I made a play list to play while I worked on Greek this morning.

So Eileen and I just decided that discretion is the better part of valor or rather more accurately that my energy pie is spoken for without going to Flint today. I hate having to reduce my activities due to shrinking capacity but it’s insane not to do this. So no trip to Flint today.

An Irishman’s Diary on a comma mistake

Bryan Garner disagrees with this dude about apostrophes (so do I) but it’s interesting to read about other grammar incidents in history of the law.

It’s almost martini time at jupe’s house and I’m just getting  to blogging. My brother, Mark, came last night bringing his daughter’s truck so we could go get Eileen’s loom today. And that’s what we did.

By the time we hit the road to Allegan it was snowing. On the way back we hit freezing rain, but Mark successfully got us and the loom safely home.

Right now, Eileen’s new loom is sitting on our porch waiting for her to figure out how to get it into the dining room where it will probably live.

We had friends help us, Ketzi Zylstra and her son Sam. This was especially helpful since Eileen took a bit of a spill in Allegan. She tripped over a poorly marked curb at the hardware store in Allegan. She is very sore right now and will probably be more sore tomorrow.

We were supposed to drive to Flint tomorrow to meet with my friends Dave and Paul. They got married this week after 39 years and invited us to a little get together at a coffee shop. Unfortunately, Eileen and i are both feeling the effects of a strenuous but satisfying day. If Eileen feels this bad or worse tomorrow we will probably call  in elderly and skip the trip to Flint.

I’m listening to new music with my silly headphones this morning. First I read this article this morning: Music With Roots | The American Conservative. It was on  my google news feed. Several sentences in the article hit me. The ones about the insipidity of music made to be consumed. Then the author goes to talk about a band I didn’t know: Sun Kil Moon. I listened to this song which apparently was used in an episode of “Sons of Anarchy.”

I wasn’t sure what I thought exactly. I liked the guitar solo at the end. Then I listened to “God Bless Ohio.” It’s got some interesting lyrics and mentions Mansfield Ohio and Shawshank Redemption. It probably captures something about this state, but I’m still thinking about this group not sure what to make of it.

Then I started systematically going through the recommendations in this article: We Asked People What Music They’re Listening To – Willamette Week

It’s kind of a weird article. Just pictures of people with their music recommendation and where they are from in the captions. I do like seeing what people are listening to and these days it’s easy to hear exactly what they are referring to with a few clicks online.

One group caught my attention.

Palm. The groove is unusual. I like how they play together and the vocals.

Last night I was reading my actual copy of this week’s New Yorker. I use it as mind candy to relax before choir rehearsal. I like the cartoons. But last night I ended up reading a couple of articles. The first one, A Protest Musical for the Trump Era – The New Yorker, is about a new musical by David Byrne based on Joan of Arc.

I can’t wait to hear the songs from this show. In the meantime, I’m listening to this live David Byrne concert. I’m not sure when it was recorded but it was uploaded in January.

I’ve known for years that Bach knew about Couperin’s music. There is a piece by Couperin in the Anna Magdalena Book, but apparently it has been copied into this home collection in an unidentified hand. Bach was familiar with the French style and copied music of composers, De Grigny, Lully, Marchand, and Marais. Setting aside the question of whether Bach applied French interpretation to his works, it is easy to see the influence of the French Classical school on many pages of Bach’s works.

Yesterday, while buy diazepam tablets continuing to play my way through François Couperin’s “Ordres” for Harpsichord, I ran across a reference to the fact that the two men exchanged letters which are now lost. Philippe Beaussant goes on to point out the similarity of two of Couperin’s late works to specific Bach compositions.

I have been playing Bach’s Italian Concerto as I mentioned yesterday. So it was quite a surprise to see the opening measures to it practically duplicated in Couperin’s La Misterieuse in his 25th Ordre.

See for yourself:

Bach:

Couperin:

I was in a bit of haze much of yesterday. Some of it was the usual post-Sunday fatigue. Some of it was having a church meeting at the end of the day sort of hanging over me. I tricked myself into getting some organ practice in by going to church and pulling some French Classical and Early North German Baroque scores to read through.

At first I tried to get myself interested by pulling down numerous scores from the web. These consisted of composers that Bach knew and was influenced by. But when I thought of how clunky it is to read music on my tablet for a couple of hours I decided to look for some real scores to use.

This book was sitting in my files. I have great respect for the editor having met her and done a little study with her as a guest artist at Wayne State in the 80s. I love these Annotated Performer’s Editions and plan to buy more. Yesterday I played entirely through this book and enjoyed it immensely. I’m hoping to perform a couple of charming movements from it on my new Pasi at some point.

This “Récit de Nazrd” is one I especially like. This player does a good job with it.

Then I turned to Georg Böhm.

I played through the first three Praeludia. I learned the C major years ago from Ray Ferguson and played from my new edition pictured above as a postlude last year.  Great music.

After this I came home and delayed my martini due to the impending Worship Commission meeting. I had something to eat. I tried to watch the News Hour with Eileen but finally got so upset by the way Trumpcare was being defended that I gathered some piano music together and went to church to practice piano until the meeting.

Again I turned to music I love to distract myself.

This time it was a couple etudes by Phillip Glass and the entire Italian Concerto by Bach. It worked.

When it was time for the meeting I was refreshed.

And I gently dread these meetings beforehand but actually enjoy them once I’m there.

I was very happy with yesterday’s music at church. Once again repetition in preparation paid off, both with the choir and the string trio. At Thursday’s rehearsal I asked the string players to play my pieces several times. First, in order to evaluate the realistic nature of scheduling them for performance in public in  a few days. Then after general agreement this was possible, simply repeating the pieces two or three more times in their entirety. Then on Sunday morning, we went through both the prelude and the postlude twice. This resulted in good solid performances.

I did something similar with the choral piece. On Wednesday night a chorister who has skipped many rehearsals complained after I rehearsed Sunday’s anthem a bit perfunctorily. After all, this particular anthem was designed by me to be easy peasy. But as I usually do, I repeated the anthem at rehearsal. And then again yesterday morning in the pregame, went through it twice.

The congregation was unusually attentive to the prelude. They were almost eerily quiet.

After church I had an interesting conversation with a young parishioner. She approached me with the question: how did I learn to improvise the way I did? What kind of training resulted in what I did?

This is a hard question to answer. I told her that I had started out as a rock and roll musician who had a strong interest in harpsichord music. That I built my harpsichord before attending any college in music. I told her that I had learned from college training in composition and music in general but what I did was a sort of mishmash which was largely “Pop” in nature (remembering that my cellist said my prelude piece reminded her of George Winston…. in a good way).

I told her that young musicians these days were much more likely to improvise. I was thinking that my style of improvisation probably was not far from what these young musicians were now learning in school.

She told me she was studying music education in school.  I asked her what instrument and she replied violin. She also said she would be interested in doing some playing during her summer break. I instantly told her that could happen. I think that would be fun.

I need to take some time off today. This evening is a Worship Commission meeting. I anticipate these with a vague dread but usually they’re okay. I wish I could have a day off, but apparently Monday evening is the best time to get members together.

The Words We Use About Donald Trump – The New Yorker

I mentioned yesterday that I had this bookmarked to read. I read it this morning. The words are “crazy” (meaning not mentally ill, but irrational) and “lies.”

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder | PenguinRandomHouse.com

This is a book mentioned in the previous link. It looks good.

There Is No Deep State – The New Yorker

Words and their meaning are taking a beating. It helps to keep reviewing history and actual definitions.

25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going – The New York Times

I read the NYT on my table app usually. Unfortunately, it regularly fucks up (by poor app design). I bookmarked this one to look at in a browser so I could listen to the dang songs.

A Refugee Crisis in a World of Open Doors – The New York Times

Book (Exit West) by Mohsin Hamid. Review by author I like: VIET THANH NGUYEN

A Novel Dwells on the Loves of Lovecraft – The New York Times

This sounds like a fascinating little book.

Hari Kunzru: By the Book – The New York Times

Another good collection of titles…. plus Kunzru handles language well here….

Blackacre by Monica Youn | Poetry Magazine

A poet Kunzru mentions…. this is a link to a long poem…. the title poem of the book he recommends

the FTC and the AGO

I was surprised to read in a recent American Guild of Organists magazine that the Federal Trade Commission investigated us. Someone complained about AGO procedures such as salary guidelines and ethics standards. They didn’t like the rule about informing people who hold a position before accepting gigs in their church. Apparently this guideline was in violation of US antitrust laws. Now these are all gone thanks to the law. I guess I don’t understand this very well. But it seems a shame when popular music has pretty much taken classical music into the bathtub and drowned it (to borrow a popular metaphor), that those of struggling to make our work a profession have one more nail in the coffin.

Hello Dr. Birky!

On Friday at my therapy session with Dr. Birky, when I mentioned my website (surely not for the first time) he smiled and made a note. I told him if he checked it out, he would probably read about himself. I also told him that if family or friends inform me that something I write here strikes them as inappropriate, I simply take it down.

Social contact between a crazy person and their therapist is an odd thing. I remember looking up at Mass years ago and being shocked to see my family therapist. Was he monitoring me? Of course, he was just a Catholic going to Mass. But it was a surprise.

Dr. Birky has taught me that one of the benefits of therapy is having a listening relationship that does need reciprocal reinforcement. The patient is simply free to talk about him/herself and need not concern themselves with the usual civility and needed thoughtfulness of a two way conversation. This is close to Carl Roger’s concept of reflective listening which allows the speaker to sort out their own thinking by only feeding back what they are saying.

But one of the things I like about Birky (Hi again!) is that he is able to be an authentic, believable presence. My bullshit detectors do not go off in his presence which is saying something. Anyway, I’m enjoying therapy and here’s a shout out for a good shrink!

bach’s influences

I do love the interwebs. I have often wondered about Bach’s teachers and influences. Yesterday I was able to pull up harpsichord suites by Buxtehude, Reincken, Georg Böhm and Pachelbel. Baroque harpsichord suites are something I have lots of experience with, Bach’s included. It is interesting to see what he studied and learned from. Also lots of fun to be able to pull them off the web and play them on my electric harpsichord.

The Words We Use About Donald Trump – The New Yorker

Bookmarked to read.

Eileen went with me to my appointment with Dr. Birky, my shrink. Dr. Birky lives in Glen, Michigan. Eileen wanted to go to Allegan to look at a loom she was interested in purchasing. Glen wasn’t exactly on the way, but it was closer than if I went to my appoint alone and returned to Holland and then going to Allegan together.

Believe it or not, Allegan has an old section of town which is designated as the Mill District. It has several cool old buildings one of which houses Baker Allegan Studios and Gallery. The nice people who run it were expecting Eileen. They all chattered happily about looms for a while and Eileen tried out the one she’s interested in.

She decided to purchase it. Looms are such beautiful contraptions. Eileen’s new loom is no exception.

Pipe organs area beautiful, too, of course. I received some pictures in an email updating progress on Grace’s organ.

I’ll just put a couple up here. I put all five of them on Facebooger on Grace’s Music Ministry page.

While Eileen talked with the loom people, I read Peter Williams The Organ Music of J.S. Bach. I was gratified to read that Williams concurred in print with my suspicions (voiced here yesterday) that at least one of Bach’s organ chorale settings in his Orgelbüchlein is heavily influenced by French harpsichord music. Williams even referred directly to a free prelude by Louie Couperin as an obvious precursor to Bach’s treatment of the melody, Nunn Komm der Heiden Heiland.

How cool is that? It just so happens that I recently played this particular G mnor unmeasured prelude by Louis Couperin. Although I did not register the correlation consciously I probably was influenced by playing though both of the pieces in Williams illustrations recently.

This morning I turned to Williams to see what he had to say about another setting in the Orgelbüchlein I went through in my organ practice yesterday.

This setting has always interested me because of its cross rhythms (they begin at the red arrow above). Sometimes players will play them like this:

This represent an application of French notes inégales procedure (“notes unequal” or “swung”). However, I think they are probably meant to be played not swung. When you look at Bach’s manuscript, he has positioned the quarter notes very evenly:

Peter Williams points out that the repeated even notes that result can be heard as a drone. I hadn’t thought of that.

7 takeaways from the GOP health care plan to replace Obamacare | PolitiFact

I found this helpful in the whirlwind of information and misinformation floating around.

Paul Ryan Rejects Major Changes to Health-care Bill – The Atlantic

It could be that what will save Obamacare are the more right wingers in the Republican party who reject the new law as insufficiently free of government oversight.

All of the hard work I have been putting in preparing music for my piano trio paid off yesterday! What fun! My recomposed version of the choral prelude I wrote for organ sounded even better as a piano trio piece.  This composition  drew the attention of the publishing company which owned the melody and led to my taking it off my website. So I’m not planning on recording it or anything, just performing. It’s a bit of a shame since I like it so much in this version. Dawn, my cellist said it reminded her of George Winston (but in a good way).

Both Dawn and Amy seemed to enjoy a strenuous session yesterday. We read through the new pieces and also repeated them several times. I’m hoping to feel more prepared Sunday than I have been with some of the preludes and postludes we have done recently. Repetition is my new secret weapon.

I also came up with some Elgar music for the following Sunday since we are singing an Elgar anthem that day. Amy said that this Sunday will be a Jenkins fest and the following Sunday an Elgar Fest. She really seemed to enjoy the two Elgar violin pieces I had printed up for us to consider.

I think we’ll probably perform the Pastourelle by him for the postlude and then continue working on the Virelai.

Amy is the most romantic of the three of us musicians and was very happy to be learning and performing some Elgar.

I suggested to Dawn that we perform the theme from Elgar’s cello concerto for the prelude that Sunday. She also seemed amenable so that’s the plan. I came up with solo cello and violin pieces because I couldn’t find a piano trio by him.

Earlier in the day I dragged my sorry ass over to the organ at Hope Church and practiced organ for the first time in while. I only rehearsed compositions by Bach. I worked on the trio by him I am learning, then read the entire Eb trio which  I have  performed before. This helped me stay convinced I am actually an organist.

Then I turned to the “Little Organ Book” (Orgelbüchlein). I have a long history with these pieces. On my very first organ concert at St. John’s Oscoda, I played the first four. Yesterday when I played them I gained new insights. Since I’ve been playing a lot of French classical music I could see in these pieces the influence of French harpsichord music (which Bach knew well) on what he composed. I came home and began researching this to see if any of the expert scholars I am reading now confirm this. Still working on this.

I picked up three of my recent inter library loans yesterday. One of them was on the brink of being returned. I have plenty to read but was still very curious about them.

Neil Gorsuch author of  Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia is President Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court. He obviously a brilliant man. But he is very right wing. I thought it would be enlightening to at least look over his arguments against assisted suicide and euthanasia.

I was glad to get a collection of poetry by Eileen Myles whom I ran across recently. I have begun reading this one.

 Finally, I had also requested Nathan Hill’s The Nix. I can’t remember where I heard about this but it does look good.

Speaking of Hope Church, I ran across a video yesterday of my friend Rhonda on Facebuch plugging a Tulip Time concert she is planning of Dutch Composers. I think she is imitating me in this video when she talks about an organist friend (who was apparently a bit nerdy! High praise!) who wondered aloud why local organists never perform Dutch organ music during Tulip Time. Cool.