I am still sick. But my former sore throat has been supplanted by body aches. This feels like I might be getting better, but who knows?

I didn’t start blogging to report on my health.

Oddly enough church went very well yesterday. Since I was ill, I concentrated harder on my part, especially the Bach piano playing. Of course I looked out and saw several of the local Hope college musicians who are not exactly my fans. The fugue came off very well. I had of course prepared it. But since I know I wasn’t feeling well, I ignored everything but the piano playing.

Maybe I should that all the time.

Then in the accompaniment to the anthem, I once again concentrated on playing Bach’s notes accurately. And it worked again.

Complete note accuracy for me is always a goal. It’s kind of weird because it’s what I shoot for. But at the same time, when I play a wrong note in performance I try to not let it throw me off.

Note accuracy is not my final goal. My final goal is to say something musically, to make a gesture, to communicate.

My self image is one of a pop musician despite all my academic training.

This isn’t quite right but it’s a helluva lot more accurate than associating myself with music institutions I rub up against locally.

For me the language of music is broad. Included in my understanding is the shedding of musical walls that are permeated by so many practitioners of different styles.

And that music making itself is part of being human, so everybody can’t be a star.

Ok. I’m sick and maybe not making good sense. Time to stop.

It looks like I might be ill until at least next Friday or so, if it takes ten days to get rid of this. I slept better last night (Is this what blogs by elderly people are like? Pretty soon I will be giving updates  on my bowel activity!).

Why do I feel so lousy when I wake up every morning? Wondering if I’m going to be able to shit or not. Is my body going to work? Will my bowels churn? Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers p. 5

I do find passages of this novel I read as a young man passing through my brain from time to time.

But even though I slept better in the words of Cohen, “I feel so lousy.” Fortunately, church should be easy. The most demanding thing I will do will be to play the Bach C Major fugue from the WTC vol 1 for the prelude on the piano.

Eileen drove me to the library yesterday where we chose some books for Mom to read. Then she took me to the church so I could post hymns, prep the choir room for this morning and do some minimal practice.

I played through some Robert Powell organ pieces that I am thinking of using next Sunday. The anthem is by him and I have a collection of Easter Chorale preludes that I thought I could maybe find something to play.

His organ music is not as brain dead easy as a lot of church music composers. This actually makes it more interesting. However, I am thinking next week will be a week of possibly not feeling well.

I did find a couple that would work. My plan is to submit them along with the rest of the bulletin info this afternoon. If I’m still feeling this lousy next Thursday, I will ask Mary at the office to change the prelude and postlude to only read Prelude and Postlude without a specific title and improvise them.

Improvised organ music can be my fall back option. It’s the easiest option for me. The postlude for today’s service will be an improvisation on the closing hymn. Good thing.  Did I mention I feel like shit.

It’s almost 8 AM in Holland Michigan and the sun is shining. Nice. I am feeling more charitable toward my Western Michigan environment since learning that Hendrik Meijer the founder of Meijer Grocery store was a Dutch anarchist.

Over and out.

I thought I was getting better since my symptoms are decreasing a bit. I rested all day yesterday and resisted doing the work that I needed to do but could put off. Poor Eileen took up all my slack and visited Mom and did the grocery shopping.  We ordered take out form 8th Street Grille. I was really in the mood for crispy Fish and Chips for some reason. I called it in. Eileen picked it up. It was terrible, dry and stiff. It tasted like it had been sitting under one of those restaurant heat lamps for longer than it should have been.

I had a bad night. The good news is that now I have listened to most of Scott Martelle’s book on Detroit. He tells a good story leaving out copious stuff but leaving in what one needs to know to understand what’s happening now in Detroit.

The worst part of last night was when I came out of a sleep (not particularly a deep one) wheezing and unable to breathe. It was like an asthma attack and scared the wits out of Eileen and me. I was thinking of the death last year of my cousin who was my age. He choked to death in front of his wife. Nice stuff, eh?

After I recovered and we decided not to go to ER (feeling better), I googled some stuff. I suspect I have bronchitis.  Prognosis is ten days. Treatment is rest, lots of liquids. Eileen and I talked about over the counter inhalers. I googled that and found that they are not recommended for people with high blood pressure like ME.

I dragged myself out of bed eventually. Put on some William Bolcom and Vaughan Williams on my computer to listen to. Took a long hot shower. Drank some hot lemon and honey water.  Cleaned the kitchen and made coffee listening to the relaxing music (Graceful Ghost Ray by Bolcom, Oboe Concerto by Vaughan Williams, Mexican Seranade by Joplin).

I feel pretty good right now. Planning to take it as easy as I can until this abates. I need to go post hymns for tomorrow. I’m late sending in the music for next week’s bulletin but that can wait until Monday if it has to.

Apparently, tomorrow will be another world premiere of a Steve Jenkins piece. For her birthday, I wrote my friend, Rhonda, a silly organ piece. (link to Google pdf thingo of it) It’s sort of a Paul Manz, fake Bachian, treatment of the hymn tune, CWYM RHONDDA (get it?). I wrote new words for the hymn tune. It surprises me that she is actually going to use it. It was more of a concept gift.

Ahh. Fame at last!

I finished Morrison’s  The Bluest Eye last night. I think it’s a solid book. She has her prose under control. In the afterword she takes herself to task for this first novel, but I think it’s a good one. I’ve order a copy of her next one.

Her story in The Bluest Eye is brutal. She talks about it in the afterword. She set out to write something from the point of view of victims like children.

The novelty, I thought, would be in having this story of female violation revealed from the vantage point of the victims or could-be victims of rape—the persons no one inquired of (certainly not in 1964): the girls themselves.

I was drawn in. Not too many characters to really like but I like Morrison prose.

Obama Apologizes After Drone Kills American and Italian Held by Al Qaeda – NYT

I was gratified to read Naureen Shah’s comment that it’s not just the loss of American lives that are important. This is something I think as I hear news reports. I often think I hear a bit of a subtext that the Americans are the “human.”

On Wednesday afternoon, as my schedule was lightening up, I began to notice that my throat was raspy and I was coughing more.

By the evening rehearsal I was feeling poorly but not bad enough to cancel rehearsal or crawl in bed. This continued on Thursday. However I once again did not cancel my piano trio but rehearsed with my friends feeling a bit under the weather.

I am still feeling it this morning but I believe I might be recovering from whatever this is.

I often listen to books at night. Last night I chose one that ended up being pretty interesting.

Detroit (A Biography) by Scott Martelle

Martelle, a journalist, spent some time in Detroit working for the Detroit News.

Since I listened to this in the night, I missed large portions of the book. But I did hear the beginning and the end, which led me to believe that Martelle has created a book that not only helps me understand the complexities of the demise of Detroit but of our nation.

The book link above is to his web site. I plan to do some more checking on his work and maybe even get a copy of this book to read. What I like about what he has done is his combination of history, research, grasp on economic realities and most importantly his ability to discuss the difference between individual actions and societal trends.

Very helpful to me.

BBC – Future – A five-step guide to not being stupid

I also ran across this article yesterday. I am amused how “pages” on Facebooger will do a post which is really derivative from better reporting or writing. I am alert to try to get past the filter site to the original ideas. That’s how I came on this article.

It deals with stuff I think about quite a bit.

And it also linked in another site:

List of cognitive biases – RationalWiki

I have never heard of RationalWiki. This list of cognitive biases was a revelation to me as I began reading it and thinking about it. It’s a long list and I haven’t made it all the way through it yet, but am enjoying pondering its take on concepts.

It included “framing” as a cognitive bias.

I think the idea of “framing” has done a lot of damage to our society. Especially at the hands of people who want to shape opinion and policies.

RationalWiki defines it as “drawing different conclusions from the same information, depending on how that information is presented.” This makes it more about the “framee” than the “framer” (the one doing some damage in my opinion). I hadn’t thought of it quite this way.

“Framing” is in the same part of my brain as the idea of “Don’t think of an elephant.” Involuntary biases are endlessing fascinating and very difficult to understand in one’s self.

About – Sprout Distro

I found this group after following up on a link my daughter Elizabeth put on Facebooger.

According to its website, “SPROUT DISTRO is an anarchist zine distro (distributor) and publisher based in the occupied territory currently known as Grand Rapids, Michigan. We’re organized as a collective.”

I was very encouraged to learn that West Michigan has an anarchist history.

Interesting to learn that our grocery chain, Miejer, was founded by an anarchist:

Hendrik Meijer was the founder of Meijer, the ubiquitous West Michigan grocery chain that started from a single storefront in Greenville, Michigan to become a multi-million dollar company.

The Dutch immigrant Meijer worked long hours and made many sacrifices, eventually succeeding in the grocery business. It’s the kind of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” story of capitalist success that Americans love to tell.

 

However, there’s an interesting part of the story that many do not know: Hendrik Meijer was an anarchist who disdained organized religion, hated capitalism, and— at least for a time—participated in the Dutch anarchist movement in the Netherlands and here in West Michigan.

It’s a story worth sharing because it challenges the dominant narrative that all Dutch immigrants came from conservative religious backgrounds and shows that there were a variety of anarchists active in the West Michigan area.

This was taken from a pdf of an issue of a “zine” called MobWork: Anarchists in Grand Rapides, vol 2. 

I was also blown away to learn from it that the famous Emma Goldman was in Grand Rapids in 1911 and 1912.

If this is the second of this zine, one can only wonder what the fuck was more important for including in a first volume.

This morning, I returned to reading Silence: A Christian History by David MacCulloch. As I read it, I am also returning to his Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years for cross references. I have read the latter in its entirety once in an ebook. MacCulloch likes to send his readers back and forth in his books by citing page numbers. The Kindle book I read did not have the page numbers so I was unable to fully check things out while I read it. It also didn’t have the beautiful color plates.

This morning I was going back and forth between my hard copies of these two books. I resumed rereading the history of Cluny and its importance to  the terrible time in Christian history when soldiers were sent to holy war, The Crusades.

This morning a terrible question occurred to me. What is the etymology of the word, “crusade”?

Yep. My suspicions were confirmed.  Crusade the word is related to the word, cross. I find this both discouraging and ironic. I have been asking questions about how my church has used the cross symbol this past Lent and Holy Week.

I challenged my boss a bit when she preached a weird sermon about crosses (from which I stole today’s blog title). She developed the idea of “cross” as something one bears, an affliction in life.

My ears perked up when she said these crosses do not come from God.

I saw and still see this as a bit of a distortion of the liturgical understanding of cross as symbol and its place in what liturgists call the Paschal Mystery.

Upon questioning, Jen (my boss) revealed that her main concern at that time was the idea of evil, not crosses.

Even yesterday in my meeting with the clergy, there was some feeling that we shouldn’t call Good Friday, “Good.”

I basically don’t give  much of a fuck about all this. I usually preface my comments and criticisms with a reminder that I am coming from a place of skepticism if not atheism.

But it bothers me when things don’t make sense to me.

So as you can imagine I am often wrestling with the difference between my understandings of stuff and what we are all bombarded with on a daily basis.

When the church talk turned to the idea of some churches that have changed the name of Good Friday to Holy Friday, I shuddered despite my atheism.

As we were chatting, I vaguely recalled some lines of poetry or something that addressed this. It was only this morning (with the help of Google) that I figured out what was rattling in my brain. Lines from the second of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Jen relayed that during the children’s Stations of the Cross that she led on Good Friday, at the end of it, one of the kids asked what we call “Good Friday,” good.

We had a typical churchy discussion about this and her answer (which I can’t exactly remember right now). I’m seriously thinking of emailing Eliot’s happy little five lines with a link to the whole poem to my clergy staff. Probably a silly idea.

Which brings me back to the etymology of ‘crusade.” 

What’s worse? A church service about the death of the christ or thousands of soldiers embarking on a holy war?

MacCulloch tells this little happy story

When Cluny Abbey fostered European pilgrimage to St. James in Compostela [SJ note: beginning around 1060], it was offering ordinary people the chance of access to holiness, like so much of the Gregorian Revolution. After all, the great attraction of pilgrimage was that it opened up the possibility of spiritual benefit to anyone who was capable of walking, hobbling, crawling or finding friends to carry them. But Cluny was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St. James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power. It is still possible in Hispanic cultures as far away as Central or South Ameria to watch (as I have done in Mexico) Santiago’s image triumphantly processed on horseback, with a second image, the corpse of a Muslim, pitched over his saddle. p. 381 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

Maybe I should send that happy little quote to my clergy as well.

I had a complete day off yesterday for the first time since before Holy Week. The day began with talking with Elizabeth and Alex on Skype (as I mentioned yesterday).

Eileen and I walked downtown and had breakfast at LemonJellos which has changed considerably. I have watched this shop since the owner was a barrista working for the Til Midnight restaurant which operated a small coffee shop in this location next to its restaurant (which has closed long ago). Matt, the present LemonJellos guy, was a drummer in Contemporary Christian bands and worked as a coffee jock. When Til Midnight decided to close the coffee shop, he jumped at the chance to put his own shop in.

He said at the time that he preferred selling coffee in coffee shops to traveling from coffee shop to coffee shop in a band. He immediately began considering running live music. I remember walking down with my guitar and playing music there before the business really took off. I tried to be encouraging even though I was very much the old man to these young people.

Matt hired me many times to perform. That was lots of fun. I did a lot of unusual music in his shop including arrangements of Arvo Pärt and many covers of indie artists like Fiona Apple. And of course I did a lot of original music. My bad Paul Simon songs I call them.

This work had languished for years while I was supporting my family working as a church musician for the Catholics. Around the time Matt was starting up his shop, I was in the mood to revive this music and engaged many local musicians to perform with me in local clubs and on the street.

Weirdly, I have pretty much ceased to play guitar and sing these songs. I think it has to do with the reason I wrote them which was largely therapeutic. Having no one to really play them with and no place (other than church which is where I gave my last concert of this music) to perform them, I have to say I don’t miss the music or playing guitar or banjo.

If someone was around to play with I would probably pull them out. But as it is, I find playing piano and organ alone very satisfying. And I do get to make music with others at church and in my piano trio.

Playing for ballet class can be very collaborative as well. I tend to watch the dance and change the music to better fit it. Dancers sometimes listen to the music and dance with more emotion and beauty. This is fun.

I bring all this up because I find the Lemonjellos experience now to be much like the other coffee shop in town: JPs. Both have a strong Reformed church flavor. Ministers abound. Young shiny sincere faces. It’s a bit of a hostile environment for someone like me who might accidentally say “fuck” out loud. No one is creepy to me or anything. In fact I suspect I’m pretty invisible. The invisibility of the old and different can be a good thing.

Anyway, Eileen and I had a nice quiet breakfast with each other and our devices.

While we were there, Sarah texted us from the UK and wanted to Skype. We walked home and did that.

After chatting for a while, I proposed that we continue our cyber chat in my Mom’s room at the nursing home. Sarah agreed and that’s what we did.

Mom is doing great. We kept it short and I think she enjoyed it.

I’m enjoying not having to go to an 8:30 class this morning.

I have to be at college from 11 AM to Noon, then I’m done. I will probably meet with the clergy at church and then practice organ and prepare for this evening’s choir rehearsal.

It promises to be a very light hump day indeed.

Review: In ‘The News,’ a Cacophony of Current Events – NYTimes.com

This musical sounds like fun as do some of the other pieces mentioned in the review.

Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days – NYTimes.com

First use of African American much earlier than other hyphenated American labels. Wow. 1782.

In science, has evidence given way to ideology? – The Washington Post

This article is a bit convoluted but the book and the review do ask some very interesting questions about thinking about gender and anthropology.

I had a nice chat with Elizabeth and Alex this morning. Elizabeth and Eileen chatted last night. They had arranged a 7:30 call time (that would Beijing 7:30 AM, Holland MI 7:30 PM). I begged off since it was Monday which is a bad day for me on the heels of Sunday. But I woke up when Eileen came to bed. I asked if Elizabeth was okay. She was. Eileen said I could call this morning at 7 AM (7 PM Beijing) if I wanted, which I did.

It was a slight relief that Elizabeth didn’t have news for me since I have been getting a bit of traumatic news the last 24 hours.

My Aunt Ella went in to the hospital on Saturday evening. My cousin Pam put up a Facebooger status about it. I have wanted to try to connect my Mom and her sister via Skype, but my Aunt’s family hasn’t been able to do that with me for one reason or another.

I mentioned Ella’s illness to my Mom at our daily visit yesterday. Ella apparently had pneumonia and a UTI infection. My Mom has had both of these since Dad died. The UTI seemed to be a source of cognitive confusion which apparently is not that rare for women Mom’s and Ella’s age. Plus Ella apparently is suffering from Alzheimer’s as well.

My daughter-in-law, Cynthia, is in the midst of family stuff as well. Her Dad took a turn for the worse and died last night.

Tough stuff.

In addition, a law professor who sings in my choir had a heart attack on Sunday evening. She has had heart problems in the past. This looks very serious. So when I got the text from Eileen saying that Elizabeth wanted to Skype, I wondered if it would be more traumatic news.

I do have some good news. Two of my three remaining classes will not need a pianist on Wednesday. This is good for me, although I add the caveat that I enjoy this work immensely. If it were better paid, I might choose it over church work.

That might be a reflection of my current church aversion. I haven’t gone back to read my beloved David MacCulloch even though his books sit faithfully by my chair waiting for me to get my religion back.

Yesterday despite my renewed interest in organ music, I couldn’t bring myself to go to church. That may also be the case today.

Instead, I have been taking refuge in Bach and Prokofiev.

I own Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas and admire them a great deal.

I have studied several movements of them but have not performed them.

Prokofiev seems to have the correct emotional landscape for me right now. He and Shostakovitch found a way to be artists in a repressive environment.

I’ve been thinking about this and I think that the sheer volume and availability of information on what is happening around the world is having an impact that is difficult to gauge and understand. If one accepts Friedman’s notion that mass media amplify rather than create anxiety, the volume is way over ten right now.

Also, I think that media developed to shape opinion at the expense of accuracy crosses the line from amplification to exacerbation.

I am thinking not only of Fox news and its ilk but the sophisticated use of media by factions whose aim is destruction.

Well enough happiness for one morning.

Mona Eltahawy Doesn’t Need to Be Rescued – NYTimes.com

I bookmarked this celebrity interview for this quote:

Looking at the state of Libya and Syria today, post-Arab Spring, do you ever wonder if this was worth it?

No. I often compare Egypt to a house in which every window and door has been closed shut for the past 60 to 65 years. The revolution basically opened a window in that house. And you can imagine the stench that comes out after all those years. It’s horrible, and your first instinct is to close it because it stinks. But the only way to get the smell out is to continue to open all the windows.

Has the N.R.A. Won? – NYTimes.com

I think this article describes distortion and misinformation that has fucked up America: “A majority of Americans (63 percent) said in a Gallup survey last year that crime was on the rise, despite crime statistics holding near 20-year lows.” So crime is down, fear is up. Would you like to buy an AK47?

Crossing to Safety – NYTimes.com

Apparently ghost written in the first person by an interviewer, this story enlarged my understanding of relationships, both between the person telling the story (Van Phunthavong) and her husband and between them and the people who helped them. Recommended.

Julia Wolfe’s ‘Anthracite Fields’ Wins Pulitzer Prize for Music

Cool.

I correctly anticipated a last minute small attendance yesterday of choristers at yesterday morning’s service. We have been hit hard by people committing to other things and also illness. I instantly converted our SATB anthem into a unison one, having only one soprano and one bass.

For the first time ever I had the choir intone the initial verses of the psalm in unison. That was a bit less successful due to hesitance on the part of the singers. I chimed in and sang the damn thing with them, adding a goofy strong voice.

As I prepared for this service, I realized that next week’s anthem would probably also suffer even I had good attendance at the weekly rehearsal and the service itself (probably unlikely but possible). So I found another setting of “The King of Love, My Shepherd is.” This one is one of those last minute one-rehearsal anthems.

Mark Schweizer cleverly combined Bach’s Prelude in C major from the WTC and the melody, St. Columba.

He even manages to have the melody in canon over Bach’s prelude.

It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works okay to modern ears than can tolerate a bit more clashing.

I decided to play the companion C major fugue on the piano for the prelude next week and improvise a postlude on the closing hymn. Thus I changed the choral and organ music for next Sunday yesterday. I emailed the choir a recording and a pdf of the score. I also emailed the church office the changes.

All in the life of a church musician, I guess. But it is mildly disappointing. My goal is to keep the morale of the group up while adjusting to their lessened commitment. I was thinking yesterday that leadership (in a family or a church or any system) probably depends on keeping your sense of humor especially when other people’s sense of humor is failing. Oddly, my church aversion mood helps me keep my sense of humor.

I don’t mean that I laugh at people I work for and with. I mean instead privately seeing the humor in my situation and even trying to share it when appropriate with people. I sometimes think of this as being the person in the room who is in the best mood.

You can see I’m still pretty burned out on all this. I am beginning my last week of ballet classes at college. I will actually miss doing it, but will treasure getting my mornings back.

Lawsuit in Spain Seeks Recognition of Another Dalí Creation: A Daughter – NYT

Lots of interesting little Salvatore Dali facts in this story. Exhume him to get DNA? Weird.

The Giant Rats That Save Lives – NYTimes.com

This species of rats can smell bombs hidden in the ground and TB in petri dishes. Amazing.

Can You Be a Waitress and a Feminist? – NYTimes.com

Waitresses are in a very similar position to musicians in bars and restaurants. Often we are allies in our repression for which we necessarily have to develop coping strategies. I cringe as I read what this person and others have to put up with, but recognize the syndrome and the need.

I’m being drawn back into more extensive daily rehearsal at the organ. One of the problems I have when burned out is the fact my practice instrument is at the church. This requires that I go to the source of much of my anxiety and exhaustion in order to keep my craft (such as it is) in good shape.

So when I am in a period of church aversion (as I have been), I only rehearse what I have to. But recently I have begun to do  more exploring and thinking about learning new pieces. Specifically I found a very cool prelude in A minor by J. C. Kittel.

Also, in the same collection of pieces by Bach’s students are two very clear scores of Krebs trios. I own a lot of Krebs music.

But the editions have lousy page turns. The trios in the Bach student collection are much easier in this regard.

I also began pounding away again at Calvin Hampton’s “The Primitives” from Five Dances. I have worked on this before. I was a bit discouraged to see I had dated my rehearsal notes 2010. That means I was working on this piece five years ago. Yikes.

I did learn and perform at church his “An Exalted Ritual” from this opus. I like them all and would like to learn and perform them before I die.

I have resumed hard work on Vierne’s Final from his third organ symphony. I was glad when it began to return to my fingers. I also renewed for the fourth time his biography which I am steadily if slowly reading. In order to do this I had to go to the Hope college library. One is only allowed three renewals online. Then in order to get a fourth renewal, you have to check it in and out again. That’s what I did.

I also read through about half of the first movement of Widor’s fifth organ symphony. I have worked on this before but never finished learning it.

I am forming different opinions of the French romantic organ school as I learn more about them through the Vierne book. I am almost done with his autobiography which is contained in the book along with a huge amount of other information about him, his colleagues and their organs.

It’s ironic that I am studying this school. My instrument is not a terribly good one. It’s definitely a challenge to register the French romantic stuff just enough to even practice it. I sometimes think that what I am doing in performing music on this instrument is practicing in public.

Ray Ferguson taught me to always pay close attention to registrations even when rehearsing on a practice organ. If there is a change indicated by the composer, change something, he used to say. Also, when possible always consider a literal interpretation of composer’s registrations. This stuff is handy when trying to register French romantic music especially.

But I worry that I become accustomed to pretty crappy sounds. Ah well. The life of the church organist/musician, n’est pas?

I am getting closer to realizing my goal of reading ancient Greek writers. The text I use cleverly intersperses more and more actual phrases from ancient originals as it proceeds. I am only three short sections away from the part where only sentences from original sources will be used. These will be cobbled together to make it easier, but still they will all be original. This inspires me to keep working at this task. I am not absorbing the grammar as much as the text seems to think I should be. I find memorizing tables of changes in words doesn’t really work. I can only retain what I use. However I do keep doing the exercises over and over.

Comcast seems to have entire gone away while I am working on this blog. I was listening to Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk (which is amazing by the way) and it just stopped. My computer says I’m connected but the internet access is “limited.” I’ll say it is. When this stuff happens, I invariably speculate on how poorly tech works in our lives. No day goes by without a computer of some sort malfunctioning and delaying the human. Sigh.

[Note added later: This turned out to be my computer, not the network. Again. Sigh.]

Anyway, after doing Greek (and running the dishwasher) I turned to the fascinating The Auditory Culture Reader. That’s how I ended up listening to Evelyn Glennie. The editors introduce the first section of articles and mention how one writer, Don Ihde, will discuss the bodily nature of sound, “hearing through our bodies as well as our ears. Even the deaf feel the vibrations of sound as well documented in the piano playing of Beethoven.”
Ihde is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York. I hope he does not omit mention of Evelyn Glennie. It would seem to me to be a serious omission.

This bothered me so much I went on to Facebooger and shared Glennie’s TED talk on YouTube. She even mentions that she herself is interested not just in music but in sound and helping people learn to listen. This concept is at the heart of the collection of essays in The Auditory Culture Reader. I am planning to read most if not all of the essays in the book. I will be disappointed if she is not mentioned at all. I just checked the index and she is not there. Maybe this is a Brit thing, since she’s Scottish and this collection of essays comes out of the UK.

However, I am fascinated by an emerging interdisciplinary scholarly discussion of sound in human culture and history. Ever since reading John Cage and realizing as a young man that I found many sounds in and of themselves beautiful.

I also learned a new word today, sound related: clairaudience.

It was easy to figure out what the word means: clairvoyance, clairaudience…. Oh. I get it.

But I was surprised that it was not a coined word. As you can see above someone used in 1864.

Review: Robert Ashley’s ‘Crash’ Opens at Roulette – NYTimes.com

I’ve never heard of Robert Ashley the composer. I love it that I can instantly pull up some of his music online and see what it sounds like.

Fucking, Austria – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Reddit good for something I guess, otherwise, I would never know about this place.

Eileen got up yesterday and told me that she was going to deal with my recent second insurance fail. That’s the one where once again the pharmacy at Meijer told me my insurance was denied due to lack of payment.

This was particularly frustrating since we have OVERPAID our insurance because of a mix up on policies. So one policy is showing up as underpaid, and there is no record of where the money actually went.

Eileen got in the car and drove to our insurance company’s office. She was very frustrated  but somehow with the help of people there when we went to Meijer my prescription went through. Weird.

Once again I spent most of my morning sort of on hold mentally. I’m beginning to thaw out of it. I rehearsed with Dawn the cellist and Amy the violinist yesterday. Bach, Brahms and Mozart were the composers we played through. I think all three of us find this very satisfying and inspiring.

Recently there was an online discussion on Facebook between organists. One person asked others to talk about their tastes in music. Specifically if they listen to music that is not “classical.” I was pleasantly surprised that most people responded that they routinely listened to many kinds of music. Trained organists are some of the most rigid and narrow musicians I have known.

Conversely I have known many untrained musicians who also tend to be narrow and usually specialized in one kind of music.

My string playing friends in my trio are obviously trained musicians and have much more conservative tastes than I do. While I tend to love the music they love, I also love a lot of music they find distasteful.

This has been my experience with many degree bearing musicians. On the other hand, it seems that non-classical music has come to dominate our society more aggressively. One of my objections to this is that with this domination has come a dilution of criteria for just what is effective and meaningful music.

If your idea of success is economic, you may define effective and meaningful music as the music that sells well. Unfortunately, this leads to music that is made primarily for mass consumption and often seems phoney to me. I say this as a musician who likes a great deal of popular music and realizes it has helped defined my own aesthetic.

I will go further and say that I find an aesthetic that routinely rejects genres alarmingly narrow.

As a person who embraces a wide variety of arts: musics, literature, poetry and the like, I oscillate between thinking I’m obviously correct in  my tastes and then thinking that I’m probably a bit shallow and that’s why I like so many different things. Easily amused.

I’ll close with an excellent quote from Ralph Ellison that I read this morning in my copy of The Auditory Culture Reader. 

Just as I was encouraged by the wide variety of tastes that organists on Facebooger, I was gratified to read what Ellison wrote in 1972.

Those who know their native culture and live with it unchauvinistically are never lost when encountering the unfamiliar. Living with music today we find Mozart and Ellington, Kirsten Flagstand and Chippie Hill, William L. Dawson and Carl Orff all forming part of our regular fare; all add to its significance… In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help make us what we are. In the swift whirl of time, music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspired. Art thou troubled?  Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee.” Ralph Ellison, “Living with Music” in Shadow and Act (1972)

KIrsten Flagstad was an opera singer,

Chippie Hill, a blues singer.

I had to look them up.

Fighting Homelessness, One Smartphone at a Time – NYTimes.com

Exciting program of providing smart phones with internet access to the homeless. Very cool.

Starving for Wisdom – NYTimes.com

A clear argument for studying the humanities.

Only two full days of ballet classes left: next Monday and Wednesday. I think it is the church work that primarily has burned me out, but I will take any relief I can get at this point.

I was pondering this morning how working with a church choir involves many psychological challenges. My goal these days is to be the person in the room who is in the best mood, keeping my sense of humor. I don’t get too much help with this.

It was discouraging to me last night that the strategic planning committee had scheduled its meeting at exactly the same time as choir rehearsal removing three of my singers. Of the remaining twelve singers three more were missing for one reason or another. This left us with nine singers.

Still I worked hard at preparing for this first post Triduum rehearsal. I spent my afternoon cleaning out choir folders and stuffing the new anthems. I have scheduled a couple anthems that will require singers to sing more in a high range.

Before rehearsal last night I consulted my reference books and came up with some exercises to help voice sing in their high range with more ease. These worked very well last night and I will continue to use them.

I told Eileen you know you’re burned out when you have a few days off and it feels like you are facing more work not time off.

This is my problem, but I’m working on it.

Blackwater’s Legacy Goes Beyond Public View – NYTimes.com

I have been in restaurants with people from the rich West Michigan family whose money funded Blackwater. Living in Western Michigan is a constant reminder to me of Hannah Arendent’s ideas about the banality of evil. I don’t think that people are evil. But I do think that we all are in danger of doing evil things, that those who do things that seem so atrocious are not that different from me.

Recently I have seen some odd comments on Facebooger that I felt were probably racist or classist. One person was complaining about the people who come to judicial court in their pajama bottoms. Another chimed in about the lack of respect of the defendants in the lower courts, preferring the protocol of Federal courts.

Both complainers were rich white people , the people they were complaining about were mostly likely majority black and poor.

Then there’s this unfolding story:

Atlanta School Workers Sentenced in Test Score Cheating Case – NYTimes.com

Although the prosecution team was black, the judge (who is described reports as angry) was white. I think it’s odd how the  judge punished the convicted teachers with heavier sentences when they would not submit to public shaming of apologizing to the victims of their crime.

And about that crime. It has seemed to me all along to be a more complex story than is generally being reported. I have bookmarked the following article suggested by one of the commenters on the NYT article to read:

A Middle-School Cheating Scandal – The New Yorker

What Drives the Bile Against Obama? – NYTimes.com

I put up this link because of the following comment by a letter writer:

For 34 years, and counting, our G.O.P. has steadily impoverished much of its own base with tax cuts for the wealthy, uncontrolled military spending and an erosion of help for low- and middle-income Americans while feeding that base a steady narrative of welfare slackers, unrestrained criminality, affirmative action beneficiaries and illegal-alien predators. Attacks on the president fit seamlessly into this process, generating fear that translates into political support

This seems obvious to me. But I know many people who allow their ire to be stoked and at the same time are suffering at the very hands of the people they admire and get their news from: rich politicians and tv and radio announcers.

The Servile Individualist – Rants and Things

This is a new blog by a friend of my daughter. It looks like fun.

Chimps That Hunt Offer a New View on Evolution – NYTimes.com

For some reason I find stories about how chimps behave socially interesting.

I eased from sheer exhaustion back into burn out yesterday. I basically sat around and did nothing until about 2 PM. Despite this I felt overwhelmed most of the day.

I’m regretting agreeing to play a garden wedding with a local string quartet for $100. I had email from them yesterday that the bride wants to hear the piece we are playing. It is “Until the Last Moment” for piano and string quartet by Yanni. When I pointed out that I hadn’t contracted for playing it for the bride before the wedding, my contact person said that they usually charged an additional $10 a head for players to meet and learn a new piece like this. $10????!!!! It looks like short of refusing to do this there’s no way out of it. At least they agreed that I wouldn’t have to bring my electric piano for this rehearsal/audition.

I also received my proposed fall schedule for ballet classes. They have asked me to play an 8:30 class, an 11 AM  class and a 2 PM class on Mondays and Wednesdays. The problem for me is all that time in between these three classes. I plan to talk to my friend Julie Powell today and ask if there’s any way to group my work more. If not, I’m thinking of saying no to the 8:30 AM class.

So at 2 PM yesterday I kicked into gear and went to the bank, the library, the nursing home, the church to practice and finally stopped at the grocery store to pick up groceries.

Of course I had another prescription failure. Once again the clerk informed me that my insurance had lapsed due to non payment. I said I would come back later when I had more time.

Onward. Upward.

My ballet instructor, Julie Powell, suggested to me that next year if I come under stress the way I did this year during Holy Week, I could anticipate it and take some time off from classes. This is a better solution than cutting back the amount of classes I commit to. I like it. It may be that the chair of the department who is on sabbatical might object. But it seems unlikely.

I wasn’t quite as exhausted last night after treadmilling as I was on Saturday evening. (I skipped it Sunday night). It may be that I’m gradually getting more rested.

The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison – NYTimes.com

As I exercised I read this article on Toni Morrison. I was so impressed that I decided to read her. I ordered a used paperback of her first novel, The Bluest Eye. 

I have had my eye on her ever since I understood the plot of her novel, The Beloved. I’m also reading Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind

This was a $1.99 Kindle deal recently. It’s the third edition of the research and conclusions the authors have done. It was written intentionally for a wider audience than their previous editions.

I found this diagram very helpful. Even as our symbols, heroes and rituals converge with people from other cultures. Our values remain less subject to change.

The example the authors give is how similar young people in Turkey can be to young people in America: symbols (drinking Coca-Cola), heroes (hip hop or movie stars), fashion and consumption. In these ways they are similar. But in the area of values (fundamental feelings about life and other people) they differ as much as they did a hundred or more years ago.

Furthermore these writers conclude “There is no evidence that the values of present-day generations from different countries are converging.”

This is helpful when thinking about the different cultures that are now butting up against each other on the world stage.

The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox – NYTimes.com

Observations that the way we misunderstand the Civil War has hampered our view of later wars: When are they actually over?

Andy Warhol’s Guide to Public Policy – NYTimes.com

I’m not sure I agree with some of this writer’s policies on free trade, but I do like his use of Warhol and the beauty of boring strategies.

Education as if People Mattered. ~ Justin Vood Good | elephant journal

This link is to a blog post and a good one. “The highest form of intelligence is to be able to observe oneself without judgment.” I aspire to that. Can’t do it, of course. But I aspire to it.

Finally, I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hopefully it’s not a train. I only have three days of classes left over the next week and a half. That will provide a welcome respite.

The music at church went pretty well yesterday. I had chosen a very simple setting of “Now the Green Blade Rises” for the anthem. I did have one soprano arrive very late (after emailing me she was too ill to attend). She wandered around as we rehearsed and finally sat behind her section. When I asked her if she was going to sing, she said she felt much better. I told her that the warm ups (which she had missed) were one of the most important parts of the rehearsal. In my mind was the fact that I had very carefully warmed up the sopranos for their high notes for the day already.

She asked if she should leave. I kiddingly said yes. She asked if she should sing tenor (completely baffling me for a moment and continuing to waste valuable pre-service reheaersal). I seriously said no. After a bit, I moved some altos to make room for her.

She sat down and the rehearsal continued. But I could see she was getting more and more upset. Finally she left the room.

Oy. Sigh.

All in a morning’s work at church I guess.

I played the prelude by Couperin based on O Sons and Daughters pretty well. But I accidentally picked up the wrong copy of the piece (I had two of them). On Saturday I had carefully worked out a two manual version of Couperin’s three manual piece using the little buttons that one can push.

When I sat down to perform it, I was puzzled by the way the piece was marked. I remembered having worked out the registration changes but the ones on the piece were not the ones I needed. I hastily changed a few marks and then had to begin.

I was two thirds through the eight minute piece when I figured it out.

The piece still went well enough that the retired organist made a point of telling me she enjoyed it.

In the afternoon I had to attend a recital put on by members of the local AGO chapter.

I took pics and put them up on Facebooger.

The organ at the Western Theological Seminary where the concert was held is a van Daalan.

Maybe I’m listening a bit more critically since we are installing an instrument soon, but I thought the organ didn’t sound very good. I have heard it before while listening to my friend Rhonda air out some concert pieces. She is a good player and it’s probably a tribute to her abilities that I hadn’t noticed that the sounds of the instrument are not very attractive to me.

I sure hope the instrument we install sounds better!

Love, Death and Spaghetti – NYTimes.com

A sad well written story about a woman whose husband is dying. It asks the question what actions actually comfort the dying and what comfort the living at the dying person’s expense.

The Things I Carried Back – NYTimes.com

A phenomenal story by the retiring journalist John F. Burns.

Today I plunge back into my schedule. Even though I am still weary from Holy Week, I am hopeful I can pace myself and do okay through the rest of the spring. Both church and Ballet should lighten up in a few weeks.

This morning I found myself reading Friedman. I continue to think his insights are valuable for the 21st century.

I like this:

By [a] well differentiated leader …. I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals … someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about … someone who can be separate while still connected… [who] can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, sometimes challenging presence… someone who can manage his or her own reactivity

Whew! Tough stuff. But worth trying.

Also reading in The Auditory Culture Reader I came across some good thoughts.

The best one can hope for in writing about music is better kinds of failure: the least that should be insisted on is to avoid prose that strangles the life in music

Les Beck and Michael Bull

I can feel my relationship to music changing. I am trying to be as honest with myself and my music as I can be. This has meant shedding most notions that college tried to teach me. It means embracing beauty and life in music where I find it. Also I keep asking questions about its history, how it works, and where it is going.

On the one hand I see musics that trends towards consumerism and stilted narrow understandings of historical music. These are two that repel me. But even inside commercial and academic musics I find things that interest me. This week I found the band, TV on the Radio (a commercial example) and reconnected with Francois Couperin on the piano (more academic).

Tomorrow when I reseat myself at the piano for ballet I will use all musical type languages in the way I improvise in the moment. Hopefully it will be a “better kind of failure” that doesn’t “strangle life out of the music.”

Paul Gilroy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I am working my way more slowly now through The Auditory Culture Reader. This means I come across many interesting people. Gilroy is one. He is a culture critic who has written about black studies and vernacular culture.

My spirits are finally lifting a bit. I’m still tired but not as bad as i was. In the morning yesterday, Eileen’s new loom arrived.

It was very exciting.

First we unloaded it to the garage.

I believe the next pic is called a heddle.

The people who sold it to us were very interested in our house and our books. I forget that there are other people out there who have these passions. It was fun chatting with them. They left and Eileen sat down to look at her instructions.

It wasn’t long before she decided the dining room should become the new loom room.

We moved the treadles to the back so we could assemble the main frame.

Unfortunately we forgot to put them back down in time and in the pic above they are not where they are supposed to be. Mark and Leigh arrived and helped us flip the loom and tuck them back in place.

Here’s a pic of the loom this morning.

Hanging on it is the jacket Eileen made which she brought down to show off to Mark and Leigh.

We had to move the treadmill out of the dining room and into the living room. When we did that we severely bent it. I had to tie it up to make it usable.

I used it yesterday and it didn’t fall down. I think I need to add some wire to make it more secure.

And my copy of The Auditory Culture Reader arrived! On top of all this good news, when I sat down to practice my Vierne Finale from Symphony 3 it actually seemed to go pretty well unlike it did earlier in the week.

We had a nice evening with Mark and Leigh. We went out to dinner.

Then watched some Russell Brand.

Thursday found me in a post triduum despondency. I consoled myself at my old piano at home with Bach and Couperin, mostly the latter. Glenn Gould has pretty much convinced me that the piano is a superior instrument to render baroque keyboard music. Despite that, I miss the harpsichord.

I played many pieces by Couperin yesterday. I love this music.

It requires a different kind of effort on the piano. On the harpsichord, the realizing of French baroque techniques and ornaments come very easily. When I spent time on a good French double harpsichord (one with two manuals) I discovered the old adage that the instruments teach you.

It helps me play the music on the piano with some stylistic discernment. It probably would sound weird to purists but at least I get to play music I love.

It’s also fun when I’m not quite sure when to apply which technique (“Equal notes or unwritten unequal notes?” “Which style of unequal notes?” and so on) I can pull up multiple recordings of performers and see what they decided to do. Yesterday I spent some time with Kenneth Gilbert’s recordings (link to long video of his recording of Book four of Couperin’s Orders). I didn’t always decide to do what Gilbert did. My teacher Ray Ferguson was a student of Gilbert and I remember attending a master class Gilbert gave. Gilbert is a premiere performer and editor of French Baroque keyboard masters. He has also done a beautiful  edition of Scarlatti’s keyboard essercizi.

I couldn’t face the National Pastoral Musicians dinner to which I had been invited due to the fact that I was the director of this organization locally for a while. Easter week is not a good time for me and church anyway. I rarely see or hear from my Roman Catholic colleagues. Last year I attended this dinner with Eileen. None of my dear friends were there. In addition to this, the Roman Catholic church has moved further to the right both in its morality and worship since I worked there. it’s hard enough for me to reconcile working for the Episcopal church, much less a church that doesn’t recognize women as full humans and insists on a celibate priesthood (just to name a couple of the aspects that trouble me).

Mostly I keep asking myself as why do I care so much about church? Eileen says its in my blood. I tell her that doesn’t cheer me up much. Yesterday I observed to her that I would never have predicted that at the age of 63 I would still be so connected to church work.

Eileen has been terminally cheerful since she has found a new loom to purchase. They will be delivering it this morning. On Wednesday night she was so excited she slept badly. I’m hoping she slept better last night (she’s not away as I write).

We make an odd pair: her elated,

me despondent.

Francois Couperin IV Book of Harpsichord,Kenneth Gilbert – YouTube

In case you missed the link above I put this here. I made an exercise playlist on Spotify yesterday that consisted of alternating pieces of Couperin (one Bach) and rock and roll that I like (Tv on the Radio, Living Color, the James Gang). It helped.

Bach: A Passionate Life – YouTube

I read Gardiner’s wonderful book on Bach this summer. I have watched about ten minutes of this video. Although it too is done by Gardiner, It doesn’t seem as good as the book. But I’ll probably finish it at some time.

This leads me to the further observation that where oral transmission of TV news and Radio news I have become a very grumpy old man. Even though I sometimes watch PBS news hour and listen to NPR news reports, I still find myself noticing how BAD they are, omitting basic “who, what, when, where” facts routinely and choosing the inane to report on instead of the many important things that are happening in and to our country and in and around the world. I find online reporting by New York Times and other organizations 100% better.

I read comments from my extended family that convince me that the TV and Radio media I do not watch or listen to [mostly right wing crazies] have brainwashed people into not thinking critically and stoking their anger at people they disagree with. Sheesh.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber

My new hero, Russell Brand, recommended this book on Facebooger yesterday. It’s sitting in my shopping cart. One of the points I think the author makes is that paperwork and phone trees are a form of social violence institutions wreak on us. I look forward to reading this book as soon as I finish a few others.

As I was reading the essay, “Listening to the heard worlds of antebellum America” by Mark M. Smith, in The Auditory Culture Reader, it occurred to me how sound is a recurring interest of mine. I have sitting on my stack of books I am reading a book entitled Silence : A Christian History. I thought of this book because one of the main points of The Auditory Culture Reader collection of essays is to elicit the idea of how historically human society has sounded and how it has thought about sound. MacCulloch in Silence: A Christian History has sough the same kind of overall detective work about “silence” in the history of the Christian church.

These broad connective ways of thinking interest me. And “sound” itself seems to be a bit of theme in my life being a not only a musician but someone who literally loves the “sound” of words and poetry.

As I practice my Greek daily, I read aloud. When I have read books of poetry recently, these also I read aloud. Harold Bloom has written that when he is grieving the death of a loved one he retires to his garden to read Emily Dickinson out loud.

In the introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader, Michael Bull and Les Back draw on the story of Odysseus and the sirens. They point out how when Odysseus instructs his sailors to tie him to the mast and plug their ears, he is creating a sort of private sound world for himself. This private world is a precursor for how most of us listen to music these days. We listen privately. We play recorded music in our homes and in our cars. We plug in our ear buds and move in public in an oddly private way.

Homer tells a story that can be read in this same way: one person hearing privately what a group cannot.

I of course think a lot about how people experience sound and music in my culture.

I myself am an example of someone who chooses over and over to experience sound and music privately either listening to recordings or making the music in my solitary way on the piano or the organ.

I do value making music with others. In fact, it’s something I seek out not always with success. Being a conductor of church choirs at a time when the very idea of belonging, discipline and small group identity seems to be eroding has been a life long challenge for me. My choirs have tended to be small ones (usually ten or so people). And many of these people have difficulty maintaining the weekly discipline of attending rehearsals and services.

One of the rewarding parts of being a church musician for me at this time in my life is leading a congregation in singing hymns, songs and service music. The fact that a group of people come together and do this kind of singing is a very rare and precious occurrence in the present US culture. A large group of people actually making music just doesn’t happen much these days. We no longer even sing our national anthem together at public events. It’s sung for us.

So when I hear a group of people singing with gusto it is satisfying and arouses my musical instincts to help them do it as well as they can. I even find it kind of fun. And it is also a bit of a skill to listen carefully to the singers, to think about the ends of phrases and give them a chance to breath and to pick a vocally friendly tempo for singing, neither too fast nor too slow. These little challenges intrigue me.

I realize that it  has something to do with enjoying making music with others.

If you read yesterday’s blog, you might remember that I was planning to pick up my meds yesterday. I put it on my list of things to do. Eileen went off to have her hair done, something that is a relaxing thing for her. I went to the pharmacy to pick up my diuretic meds before practicing. The pharmacist informed me that my insurance had lapsed due to non payment. I would be able to purchase my blood pressure meds at cost if I wished, about $650.

I declined to do so and phoned Eileen who immediately began calling and complaining to our insurance company.

I then went to practice. When I turned on the lights in the choir area that I use to see my organ music as I play, nothing happened. I turned the organ on and that worked so we had electricity for that. I went to the light board in the other room. On the way there I flipped on a light I use to see the light board. Nothing again. I went down to the office and asked if we were having electricity problems. They looked at me with blank looks. I guess not.

I called the janitor who happened to be on the premises. He met me at the light board. Someone had turned off switches that were taped over and marked do not touch. O. Okay. That fixed that. The janitor asked me if I would help him move the piano up from the basement where we had the Maundy Thursday service. I agreed.

Unfortunately when we moved it into the church area, one of the wheels came off taking with it a chunk of the piano. Yikes. I have never thought much of this piano which was picked out by a college teacher. The exposed wood on the piano revealed pressed board.

After talking with my boss and the local piano technician we contracted with him to put some other wheels on the piano that do not rely on being screwed into the wood, rather the piano sits on a little metal piece that has the wheels on it. He would get to that next week.

By this time, an hour had passed. Good grief. I sat down and practiced. it didn’t go particularly well despite my valiant efforts at playing slowly through the Vierne movement I had been working on pre-Easter.

Eileen texted me that the insurance people said they would have cleared up the confusion around my prescriptions by three pm.

But of course when we went to pick them up we got the same story from the pharmacist. Eileen called the insurance people on the spot and managed to clear up the situation.

I took my blood pressure at the pharmacy area in Meijer where we were. It was high (168/104). Great.

We came home and I took a pill. This meant I had only missed two days of pills. I wanted to exercise but wondered about the wisdom of doing so with elevated blood pressure. I took my blood pressure again at home and it had fallen 18 points on the upper number (the one that seems important). i exercised.

This was supposed to have been a day off for recuperating. Unfortunately it didn’t quite go like that. Today I have one ballet class. I have permission to skip the other two to do a funeral at church. Of course they won’t pay me for skipped classes. I work by the hour. My boss looked so forlorn (she buried a favorite dog recently) I didn’t have the heart to complain about this. Fuck it. I’ll still get paid for the funeral. And there’s no choir rehearsal tonight. Thank god for that.

Evelyn Starks Hardy, Founder of the Gospel Harmonettes, Dies at 92 – NYT

I admire the gospel singers. This woman sounds like she was important to the movement.