It looks like this morning’s post will be short but probably disturbing especially if you follow any of these links.

I finished reading my ebook copy of Michael Robbins’s book of poems, Second Sex, this morning.

In the acknowledgements, he had this link:

A Poem for President Drone | The Los Angeles Review of Books

I voted for Obama, but I do strongly object when any government takes a life, so the drone stuff has been making crazy. I think that I live in a similar context that Robbins does and agree with his point of view in this article. This is one of the reasons living in Holland can be so disjunct for me.

The above linked essay is about Robbins not voting for Obama. I accept that voting for Obama was a futile gesture. I also accept his idea that

you would have to be ignorant not to notice that his African ancestry is pretty much all that differentiates Obama from his predecessors. The man graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. On economic issues, he is, for the most part, to the right of Richard Nixon.

(from the above linked article)

Also the article is about being invited to write an alternative inaugural poem (for $300) by Yahoo, then having it rejected because of the use of the word, “Queef.”

Queef is  a “vaginal fart.” I admit that I recognized the word but since Robbins said the OED entry was “mildly hilarious” I looked it up there.

There doesn’t seem to be a separate entry for it. Only this:

This is only an aside from Robbins’s main point where to buy diazepam for dogs which is that our government is killing people and we the people of the USA are complicit.

I thought about linking this article on Facebooger and decided not to probably because there is too much reality in it (not because of the word, “queef”).

Here are a few of the links I have bookmarked from Robbins’s article.

Living Under Drones

 Lunch with the FT: Noam Chomsky – FT.com

Obama victory infuriates Pakistani drone victims | Reuters

As if this wasn’t disturbing enough, I turned to my reading of the sociologist/economist Gunner Myrdal.

Two points from him.

First, we must study history for a good reason:

“to free us from the power the dead have over our lives.”

I quite like that.

Secondly, the consideration of apriority assumptions in any reasoning is unavoidable. I find this very helpful.

Myrdal divides these into two approaches, the uncritical and the “value critical.” I’ll leave off the second one for now, but the first one reminds me very much of living in Holland and probably the USA in general.

The one method I have already characterized as epistemologically naive. It consists of an uncritical acceptance of a certain world image and a certain complex of philosophical ideas. These are put forth as ‘natural,’ as conclusions from certain self-evident philosophical principles or from certain elementary psychological sentences that themselves do not have to be substantiated—or they might also (and usually) not be presented at all but are implicitly assumed and incorporated…

Gunnar Myrdal, “The Altered World Image in Political Economy” excerpted in THE ESSENTIAL GUNNAR MYRDAL, p 62

I was so tired yesterday at the end of the day, I skipped treadmilling. I rarely do this, but it was a beautiful fall day and Eileen agreed to sit with me while I had my martini outside.

She has been madly canning. Stewed tomatoes, huckleberry jam, bread and butter pickles. Ever since returning from China, canning seems to be high on her list.

My improvisations for Ballet class have been more and more elaborate lately. Not sure why this is, but it is what comes out.

In between classes yesterday I played through two of the four duetti Bach included in his Clavier Übung III. These are weird little pieces that I don’t quite understand.

I am thinking about this volume having just learned the final fugue from it. Most of the work consists of large and smaller chorale preludes on the tunes from the so called Lutheran mass.

I think I understand the rest of this great collection of organ pieces, but the duets seem more esoteric. Judging from a bit of poking around they are a mystery I believe to the academic world of musicology.

However, they seem to be Bach flexing his counterpuntal muscles in a limited setting of two voices.

I played through the third one in G major this morning. I’m still pondering the meaning of these pieces.

Since watching the second Hunger Games movie, I have returned to reading the book.

I have done this because I think the second movie is not a terribly good movie, while I thought the first movie better than the book.

I was surprised to find Collins’ prose more lucid than I remember. Probably this is a result of reading too much George R. R. Martin.

Today I need to take it easy. I don’t have too many tasks set for myself. Eileen packed a super secret package to mail to the U.K. Alright, it’s not that super secret since the recipient of the gifts in it does not read this blog according to the purchaser of the contents, the beautiful daughter Sarah.

I think our desktop may have hit its final day yesterday. It’s working on an old operating system. Eileen has been trying to use it to print up some stuff and finding it frustrating. I hooked up the big laptop to the printer and that worked easily. Although Windows 10 is annoying, it is probably a tad better for use with the printer than the old desktop.

I was glad that it was essentially “plug and play.”

The truth behind America’s most famous gay-hate murder | World news | The Observer

A friend of mine linked this on Facebooger yesterday. Surprising information. Then someone rebutted with the following  link.

Debunking Stephen Jimenez’s Effort To De-Gay Matthew Shepard’s Murder

After looking them both over, my conclusion was that the Observer article is better reported and in the future I will look with a jaundiced eye at the source of the second, Mediamatters.org.

Jack Bruce, Cream’s Adventurous Bassist, Dies at 71 – NYTimes.com

What can I say? Another musician I listened to in my youth bites the dust.

Chen Ziming, Dissident in China, Is Dead at 62 – NYTimes.com

Another much needed moderate reformer voice is silenced in China. This time by death.

The Meaning of Fulfillment – NYTimes.com

Although a lot of the quiescence in this article seems a bit premature to me (Do not go gently), the fulfillment is something I am familiar with at my age.

Fathers, Sons and the Presidency – NYTimes.com

• sons and fathers often stand at the greatest remove, neither able to read the other

I think about my father a lot. This quote made me think of him, since he was so opaque to me throughout his life.

The Other Side of the Living Sea – NYTimes.com

Nicely written essay about seeking out one’s origins and family.

The Problem With Positive Thinking – NYTimes.com

practical thinking.

The Disgust Election – NYTimes.com

We Americans have long boasted of having free and fair elections. Thanks to this Supreme Court, they are neither.

My spam for the last 24 hours is over a thousand hits again. Weird.

It’s ironic that yesterday which culminated two weeks of intensive preparation of a piece of music found me not exactly dreading the day, but feeling a sort of numb wish to not have to go through with it.

I still looked forward to the music (all of it, not just the postlude), but I was reminded of a childhood story told to me about myself.

My Dad would often begin his sermons with a rhetorical question. One time he began, “Do you ever get tired of church?” To which I unhesitatingly responded in my six or seven year old voice, “Yes!”

It’s difficult to relate my state of mind yesterday. But I guess it’s not that uncommon to not want to go to work, even work you enjoy at many levels.

I know that part of this was dreading not having the rest of the day to recuperate.

Well that dread is vindicated since I am mentally and physically exhausted this morning.

When I am in this mood, the things that I can usually overlook are harder to ignore. The pathologies of those I serve, the radically different values  of the community, and the barely heated through vegetarian entree at the dinner usually wouldn’t bother me at all. Yesterday seemed a drum beat of mediocrity for me to withstand.

And withstand it I did. The organ music all went well. The choir sounded excellent. I had been thinking about my lack of motivation to research methods to improve their sound in the pregame (This is something I do routinely which sort of jump starts my choral technique). Instead I relied on my skill and took them through some exercises some of which I made up on the spot. The choral sound was good thereafter.

When I got off the bench from performing the postlude, Eileen noticed that I was on the verge of tears. Indeed, I couldn’t tell her since I was overwhelmed, but what was happening in me was a result of the vulnerability I find necessary, desirable even, to a good performance.

I noticed that I was understandably thinking a lot about the postlude throughout the service. It occurred to me that I was overthinking it. This is a basic performance problem.

The antidote is to immerse oneself in the music.  At least it is for me.

I love the Bach St. Anne Fugue. I think Bach takes an erudite scholarly beginning and gradually transforms it into a lively dance of playfulness and shrewd insight.

This culminates for me in a section in which all five voices are moving in quickly lovely dance like counterpoint.

It is fun to play. But easy to fall off the tight wire at that point. One has to balance pleasure with care and ignore distractions.

After a performance like this sometimes I am overwhelmed with emotion that is hard to describe.  I’m  not upset in the usual sense of being unhappy or disappointed or really any negative emotion. If I had to describe it, I would say I am overwhelmed with the terrible beauty of the moment and rendered wordless and swirling in feeling.

Eileen and I were talking later about it and she pointed out how this was a general family trait in the Jenkinses. Don’t I know it.

Every day before I blog, I empty my spam cache. The last few days, the spam has tripled to over a 1,000 per day. Not sure what that means. I conjecture that traffic is up on the web, possibly due to upcoming US elections but hard to say.

I’ve been listening to some Bob Dylan.

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal

How does it feel

It surprises me how well I remember the lyrics from his “Blonde on Blonde” album and his “Highway 61 Revisited” album. It also surprises how attractive I find the words as poetry.

The past two days I have rehearsed all the way through today’s postlude (the Bach St. Anne Fugue) eight times a day plus additional attention to certain technical problems. I did it each day in two settings.

I’m interested to see how it goes today. Unfortunately, I timed the prelude which is a set of variations on St. Anne by Jan Bender and it came out to nine minutes. That means I will possibly be subjecting people to over fifteen minutes of  organ music today.

The church is having its annual Octoberfest this afternoon at 5. I am dreading it. I don’t have to do anything but show up, but I need to rest up on Sunday afternoons for my Monday work day which begins at 8:30 AM.

The Bad Plus Plays Ornette Coleman – NYTimes.com

This review of a recent tribute concert makes me want to go and listen to the original album. Spotify here I come.

Oklahoma: Driver Destroys Ten Commandments – NYTimes.com

“Satan” made him do it.

Ebola’s Information Paradox – NYTimes.com

Quick access to information helps and hinders.

China Moves to Reinforce Rule of Law, With Caveats – NYTimes.com

This has got to interest my son-in-law the Chinese law dude.

U.N. Human Rights Panel Urges China to Allow Free Elections in Hong Kong – NY

I know it’s silly but the Chinese actually agreed to uphold a 1990s  “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a United Nations-enforced treaty that commits the signatories to respect civil rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the right to free elections.”

Beijing Formally Charges Writer Who Published Memoirs of Victims of Mao Era – 

Still working on reading a bio of Mao. The history of China is amazing and crazy.

Man’s Genome From 45,000 Years Ago Is Reconstructed – NYTimes.com

I love this shit.

Amid Clamor Over Democracy, Hong Kong’s Tycoons Keep Silent – NYTimes.com

I’m linking this because it identifies Asia’s wealthiest man, Li Ka-shing,

I have been thinking about my place in the wonderful world of music. I know that I am happy and lucky to be able to connect with the music I love. But at the same time I feel like there’s not really any niche I fit into.

I do feel like many people enjoy the music I make.

This leads me to post an occasional video on YouTube like this one:

I know my grandson is liable to see this. I also put it up on Facebook. I have had three likes from “friends” (one of which was Eileen!). The YouTube site has had nine hits and one “like.”

Ah my public!

I feel kind of weird posting a video like this. I routinely tape myself to time stuff which is why I made this video with my phone. I know it’s crappy. The organ is crappy. The playing  is respectable for only twelve days of study. At least I think it is. This was yesterday. After taping this in the morning I went back and practiced again for an hour or so. Today I will probably do a couple hours.

I had some interesting conversations with Amy and Dawn about learning a piece of literature like this and performing it on a bad instrument in an indifferent acoustic to people who may or may not be interested in listening.

Am I over functioning? I asked and they quickly understood. I compare it to attempting to play a respectable classical guitar piece on a ukelele.

I like to think I’m not overfunctioning, just functioning as the musician I am in the contexte in which I find myself.  Being a musician in a time when in most people’s minds being one means either that one is a rich celebrity or one is heavily invested in the academic view of it can be weird for an old rock and roller like myself.

But like I say, I’m lucky and I feel lucky.

I always learn something playing with my piano trio. Dawn, the cellist, is a seasoned symphony player. I marvel at her ability to keep track of where the beat is with such fierce accuracy despite not being able to see the other parts she is playing with.

Yesterday we were playing the last movement of the Bach violin sonata in E major BWV 1016.

It begins with a healthy duple feel. Suddenly he introduces triplets in the violin part. The continuo (cello and keyboard) continues in duplets. Later the violinist said that it was a good mental exercise.

This was especially difficult since we often read under tempo. At a quicker tempo it would have been easier.

Eventually the treble part of the keyboard part also does triplets against duple in the rest of the ensemble. Usually the continuo part is just the bass part with some indications of what chords should be played by the third instrument which could be keyboard or even lute. One of the things I like about theses sonatas is that Bach composed the right hand of the keyboard part making it much more interesting for me. The cello (which is doubled by the left hand of the keyboard player) never does triplets in this movement.

I marveled at Dawn’s ability to keep her steady duple playing often correctly after the beat despite the disturbance of the rhythms in the other parts.

Earlier she and I had sight read through some of Bach’s Gamba sonata in D major BWV 1028 which were quite tricky especially the 12/8 movement.

It is a pleasure to watch her read with such clarity and accuracy.

It is also an education and a pleasure to work with my violinist Amy. She has fallen in love with a Mozart violin sonata movement which we rehearsed yesterday.

Our edition is marked in cut time. After we had played through the movement Amy and I talked about what was happening with the music. Sometimes the triplets in the violin and the piano are thematic, sometimes they are accompaniment. I discovered that she was counting this as written in 2. I was counting it in 4. We did again and the results were pretty amazing when I also felt it in 2.

In the excerpt below, when we played it and I was counting in 4, I would beat Amy to the two eighth notes. Amy put a musical very slight hesitation at the point where the red arrow is.

When I counted the piece as she did, I noticed how natural and musical it was to do that.

How about that?

The dance department chair, Linda Graham, and Julie Powell, one of the instructors I work with, cornered me yesterday and asked me if I would be willing to add two more days of classes next term. I told them no. It’s flattering to be asked and I do enjoy the work but I need to pace myself and balance my activities with my energy.

I did manage to squeeze in my requisite two hours rehearsal of Sunday’s postlude. I asked Jen, my boss, if she thought it was goofy to play a seven minute postlude. I have colleagues who have quit playing postludes due to people’s inattention.

I do not mind finishing a piece alone but I want to continue to examine the appropriateness of my work as a professional church musician.

Jen was enthusiastic in her support for this. When I mentioned that the St. Anne Fugue (the piece in question) was not actually based on the hymn tune it resembles she also agreed I should put a little note in the bulletin about this because it’s kind of interesting.

So I did that.

Reading about the “preluding” practice of performers from Bach to Beethoven has provided me with a number of insights about music I have been looking at most of my adult life.

Once some music puzzles have been set into the context of the expectation that performers would add music to concerts,  they make  more sense.

An example (which Kenneth Hamilton gives) is Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words” op. 30, no. 3.

The strumming chords at the beginning (which seem unrelated to anything that follows) is exactly what a musician might do as a set-up prelude for a piece to follow.

I had another insight provided by factoring in this process. Preluding is exactly what one does when one introduces a ballet exercise or a hymn to be sung by a congregation.

In the latter case, I often improvise an introduction to a hymn and do not slavishly play the last four measures to introduce it.

When serving as a ballet class pianist for the International Cecchetti camp that is held here in Holland I ran into one teacher who was dissatisfied with my introductions (called “preparations” by the ballet people).

Usually I try to be very clear and end my preparation on an unresolved feeling chord. One teacher balked at this. She said my preparations felt incomplete to her.

I of course adapted and quit doing that for her classes and did a prep with a resolved ending. I concluded that this was probably the practice of the teacher’s regular pianist.

Somewhere in Hamilton he mentions that preludes before a piece normally did not resolve but left a sense of wanting to go on to the piece itself.

Apparently when moving from one piece to another this was done with a series of unresolved chords (which musician call diminished sevenths) which are very easy to use to change from one key another. This change was often the goal of the improvised interlude.

This lack of resolution in an improvised prelude or interlude introducing an upcoming piece helps me feel that my choice of doing the same thing in a preparation for a ballet combination is justified.

Silicon Valley CEOs Get A Warm Washington Welcome To Politics

Our own Fred Upton.

Escape from Microsoft Word by Edward Mendelson | NYRblog | The New York Rev

How Word is a work of genius, but useless. Hi tech, lo efficiency.

Political Polarization & Media Habits | Pew Research Center

Dang liberals are more ideological than conservatives …. interesting findings.

On Sunday the organ committee decided which builder to recommend to the vestry. Monday evening Jen took the recommendation to the vestry and it passed. Yesterday as I was practicing organ she dropped by and told me I could let the builder know. I emailed him and as I was making my evening martini, he called me. He seemed very pleased to land our contract even though in the world of pipe organs it has to be a relatively small one (around 600 K).

For the last two days I have spent at least two hours rehearsing the seven minute postlude for this Sunday.

Bach’s St. Anne Fugue ends his masterwork the Clavier-Übung III. This collection of chorales is sometimes called the German Organ Mass. In it Bach set the Lutheran chorale adaptation of many Mass parts, including the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Creed, the Our Father.

He sandwiches them between a huge prelude and fugue. The St. Anne Fugue is the fugue from this collection.

My recent reading is reinforcing my distaste for the performance of a work like this in one concert. It is almost certain that Bach and other composers up through Beethoven never envisioned public performances of their works in their entirety such as ALL of the Clavier-Übung III in one setting or ALL of Beethoven’s sonatas.

I am learning a lot from Kenneth Hamilton (After the Golden Age) about how music was performed before the 20th century. Once again the influence of recordings is pervasive and not necessarily on people’s radar.

Hamilton points out that complete CD sets (not to say record collections) of lengthy works influenced the choice of performers to perform ALL of a set of pieces or at least many of them.

Original composers would have thought about the public performance of their work very differently, expecting movements to be performed separately from a larger work. In the case of piano and other keyboard music, the composer would be surprised if the performer did not extemporize “preludes” before and between excerpts of their work.

Interestingly, the function of the prelude was often to get the attention of a group of people in a room, sort of announcing that music was coming.

I lose patience as a listener when the wonderful variety available to any present day concert is reduced to a sort of lengthy pedagogical exercise. My old teacher Craig Cramer used to say if you can’t say what you need to say in forty five minutes or so, something is out of whack.

Or something like that.

Yesterday I took my Mom to Miracle Ear and she decided to purchase a new remote for her hearing aids. We put it on her Discover. Later I got an email from Discover.

Cursing I logged on to my Mom’s account. For the life of me, I couldn’t find a way to change the limit. I used the link in the email but that took me to a place to change my notifications. I searched the fucking site with the word “limits.” But no hits.

Finally I just assumed that it’s still going to pay this amount, it’s just set-up probably by default to notify the card owner if a transaction is over a certain amount.

I was laying in bed this morning pleasantly tired but enjoying laying there. I wanted to keep my body in bed a bit longer, so I attempted to load Michigan Radio’s web site to stream NPR.

No internet.

This is the first time this has happened since installing my new modem. Sigh.

After a short while I was so annoyed I had to get up and problem solve the dam thing.

I looked in the material that came with it. It said to turn the new unit off and restart. Of course there was no on/off button. The instructions appeared to be a generic set for several different kinds of modems. Undeterred I unplugged it.

That didn’t work so I called Comcast to find out from their annoying robot that cable and internet is down and my area shortly to be restored.

Earlier this week I was ordering pizza online. The operator’s computer was slow and then he gasped. Oh no! He said, my computer’s just gone down.

I mention all this to illustrate something that has occurred to me which is that tech is no more efficient at providing us services than anything else I have experienced in my life. Plus we all just take it for granted that to use tech is to be inconvenienced.

I used to assume that the reason I had just trouble with tech was that I couldn’t afford the state of the art best stuff which i assume the dam geeks who make this shit use to test it.

But even with state of the art if you called to order a pizza (or talk to ANY service provider on line in person) one routinely runs into the sigh and then both the caller and service provider understand that one is once again using up minutes of ones life waiting for a fucking computer.

Steven Pinker’s ‘The Sense of Style’ – NYTimes.com

This book looks like fun. Link is to book review of it.

Zephyr Teachout’s ‘Corruption in America’ – NYTimes.com

Another book that looks good to me.

Some quotes from the review:

Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.”

• what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Historic Loss May Follow Rise of Rents in Barcelona – NYTimes.com

Barcelona a city I have visited has a wonderful historic charm. This will fix that.

Pumpkin Festival Takes a Menacing Turn – NYTimes.com

My brother lives in Keene.

Cuba’s Impressive Role on Ebola – NYTimes.com

Did you know that Cuba routinely sends medical help to hurting countries?

Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K. – NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman puts the Amazon stuff in perspective.

Busy Sunday yesterday. By 3 PM, I was confronting the fact that I was overfunctioning like crazy. Before church, as I mentioned yesterday, I helped daughter Sarah with some US online purchases.  Some web sites get a little nervous about accepting UK credentials. I did manage to get my descants redone but left one of them sitting in my printer (this is evidence of off balance).

Our acoustic consultant, Dawn Schuette of Threshold Acoustics in Chicago, was visiting for a consult.  She was expecting the choir to rehearse in the church so I complied even though I had planned not to do so.

The service went fine. I wasn’t extremely happy with our choral sound as I sometimes am. This was due to my own leadership I am sure. I always lay the sound of an ensemble at the feet of its conductor for good or ill. It wasn’t bad yesterday but I can do better.

The congregation was also lukewarm in its singing. Not bad, but we can do better.

It might have worked out okay however since it gave Dawn Schuette a clear platform to point out how some acoustical renovation would help support congregational singing.

She had some very clear ideas about what we could do in our situation. The committee surprised me in its final recommendation that we begin moving immediately on sealing the porous surface of the cinder block wall. The first step will be to price how much it might cost. Jen is going to the Vestry with this recommendation this evening.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

The committee met with Dawn after church. Then after she left we continued to meet. I think it was around 1:30 PM before I got away. By that time I was feeling pretty saturated with church stuff. Not necessarily in a good way. The introvert in me comes away wondering what damage I have done with my own reactions.

I see myself as an outsider in the church situation. And this is in a church which is very supportive of my work. When I consider my relationship to the dominant church community in our area, I feel even more estranged.

Gunnar Myrdal got me to thinking about this when he described Calvinism as keeping “a firm where to buy diazepam in australia line between the redeemed and sinners.” This was helpful to me when thinking about the local situation. I know that the local church musicians keep this sinner at an arm’s length and have for years.  When my colleague Rhonda Edgington broke ranks with them and reached out a bit to me, she observed that I was the “black sheep” of the group.

It always interests me how prevalent racism is in American consciousness. I can remember using the phrase “black sheep” in a  conversation once. One person who was black quietly and firmly said that he had always hated that phrase. Now whenever I hear it, I also hear this compassionate man’s voice and it helps me remember how privileged I have been in my life. So I guess I am happy to grouped with the other.

After lunch I went back to church and worked hard on the Bach St. Anne fugue. I am still seriously considering performing the entire seven or so minutes of this piece as the postlude next Sunday. After returning it hit me that I was on overfunction. Eileen observed that despite this I am doing things that I love. That’s for sure.

And it’s ironic that I feel like an outsider as the church community I serve is taking serious steps to bring the worshiping space and facilities (organ and acoustics) up to my own professional standards.

Some people always complain, eh?

In City of Protests, Pro-Democracy Newspaper Becomes Target – NYTimes.com

Kind of a give away when one of the anti-Democracy demonstrators brings their maid.

Cord-Cutters Rejoice: CBS Joins Web Stream – NYTimes.com

When will these people just stream their stuff with ads? Monthly charge? No thank you.

From Jimmy Carter, a Rebuke to Egypt – NYTimes.com

You know you’re in trouble when the crazy idealists give up on you.

Are Women Better Decision Makers? – NYTimes.com

Real research. Very interesting. I have to say that I can remember panicking once when Eileen and I came home and our young daughters were simply gone. Eileen kept her head and was very calm though she shared my concern. I was very grateful for her levelheadedness. The kids were of course alright.

The Boys in the Clubhouse – NYTimes.com

I find sports pretty boring but this was an interest report.

Running a little behind this morning. I just helped daughter Sarah make an order on Gap.com. I also would like to make new copies of two descants for this morning’s Eucharist since the old copies from the church’s library are pretty crappy.

My thought for today is that I learned a new fact about Chopin’s Preludes for piano yesterday. Since there are 24 of them, I always sort of associated them with Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier which also runs through all the keys. But actually they are something else.

Kenneth Hamilton says they are composed versions of pieces pianists would improvise before playing a piece. Apparently this was a wide spread phenomenon in the 19th century. And many composers published examples of them. I was looking through Clementi’s Introduction to the Art of Piano Playing Op. 42 and noticed that before each group of compositions he has provided for students by other composers is a little strummy prelude that looks like he wrote as an example of how to prelude before performing one of the pieces.

Who knew?

So I’m wading through some dry reading to get to some substantive ideas. I’m 20% into Mao: The Real Story. I’m reading it on my Kindle which is why I say 20% since the Kindle indicates this as well as that I am on page 194 of 755.

It’s just  beginning to heat up. I’m at very early stages of the Communist movement or revolution or whatever you want to call it. Despite the professed goal of historical objectivity I continue to find weird little passages of opinion and emotional comments. Nevertheless I am prepared to accept that this biography is not as distorted as some of the others I have attempted since the authors used resource material (from Russia and China) that was not available previously.

It can be slow going however to read about the convoluted back and forth between Russia and the leftists (the Communists) and the rightists (the Nationalists) gradually emerge into recognizable factions in the late 20s.

I plowed through some pages in the The Essential Gunnar Myrdal as well.

The first essay bogs down into a detailed description of two generations of influential Swedish economists. After reading several pages this morning, I flipped to the last essay which was a speech Myrdal gave in 1974 called “A Worried America.” Much more interesting reading.

I was amused to see that the speech ends with this paragraph:

To find the practical formulas for this never-ending reconstruction of society is the supreme task of social science. The world catastrophe places tremendous difficulties in our way and may shake our confidence to the depths. Yet we have today in social science a greater trust in the improvability of man and society than we have ever  had since the Enlightenment.

Myrdal is actually quoting the last paragraph of his work An American Dilemma. In her introduction to this anthology his daughter Sissela Bok talks about this.

Gunmar often pointed to the final paragraphs of “An American Dilemma” and to the last word of the last paragraph: Enlightenment. I remember his telling me of being impressed, in studying the great nineteenth-century British thinkers, to see how meticulously they often chose the last word of their texts. He never saw reason to change the last word in “An American Dilemma. To the end, he stood by the convictions expressed in the last paragraphs of that book:

And then she quotes in full the aforementioned paragraph.

Clever editors and clever daughter.

I have been intellectually hungry for some reading material that has substance. I just happened to notice a book sitting in a stack upstairs.

I vaguely remembered ordering The Essential Gunmar Myrdal for a reason and then not getting around to reading it. I picked it up and underneath was another Myrdal book, Volume one of his An American Dilemma.

I left it there and only took the first book to peruse. I read a bit in it yesterday and this morning. Myrdal was born in 1898 in Sweden. That makes him in my grandparents generation. He was apparently an international thinker and made astute critiques of injustice in the world and did work on American racism and poverty.

In 1954, he wrote “What we need today is a courage of desperation, which all the time seeks and exposes the cold and full truth, and which is strong enough serious reverses and long retreats. That is the courage that will urge us to fight on, against all odds, for the better world we want and can create.” One of his myriad concerns was “the establishment of full employment and social equality as political goals.”

As I read Myrdal I realize that we in America have lost sight of our ideals as a democracy. The idea that full employment is a radical notion is troubling. Myrdal was interested in humans realizing their potential. This means an unemployed person is not only a hurting person, but also a waste of resources for the society at large.

Crazy, huh?

We live in a culture inundated by the extreme noise of celebrity and superficial reduction of human ideas and concepts into slogans and sound bytes.

Jefferson’s notion of educate the people and they will govern themselves is ebbing fast. So many of us reach adulthood with so little ability to reason and background of real information.  This is as true of those who pass through (and often remain in) our education system as those who haven’t.

In Frank Bruni’s recent New York Times column, “Scarier than Ebola,” we can find startling evidence of the lack of educated citizens.

Both The Hollywood Reporter and Time magazine recently published accounts of anti-vaccine madness among supposedly educated, affluent Americans in particular. According to the story in The Hollywood Reporter, by Gary Baum, the parents of 57 percent of the children at a Beverly Hills preschool and of 68 percent at one in Santa Monica had filed personal-belief exemptions from having their kids vaccinated.

These people can vote.

And daily I am startled by evidence of the lack of awareness of educated well meaning people.

A good example is the turning away from reasoned evidence that people who are poor in the USA, people of color especially, are caught in a web of circumstance that would probably produce poverty no matter what. Intellectuals in the last decades (Charles Murray and others) have attempted to say that the “culture” played a determining role. By “culture” they inevitably mean inherent characteristics either implied or made explicit. (can you say “Racism”?).

I searched in my online bookmark service (Diigo) to see if I could find how I ran across Myrdal. I came up with two links.

Poor Reason | Boston Review

This 2011 article is about the “culture” stuff I was just talking about. I haven’t finished reading it yet. Haven’t even run across mention of Myrdal, but I’m sure it’s in there since it came up under a search for his name.

Disarmament, Technology and the Growth in Violence

This is the speech given by Myrdal’s wife Alva on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. They were life long colleagues in the same kinds of work. Alva insisted that Gunmar study economics at one point. In 1974, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.

The ideas espoused by these two brave thinkers are much of what is missing in our public rhetoric and discussions in the USA.

My theory is that if we knew more and had been taught to think and reason more clearly, our entire society would benefit. The sanity of what these two talked about would not be so rare or radical.

“Resurrecting Smallpox? Easier Than You Think “

This has some amazing stuff in it. Aldeman, the author, talks about a machine he had in he 90s which could take a DNA series and replicate it into a real molecule. He contemplated making an HIV molecule since the series was online. Smallpox is also online. Wow!

In Britain, ‘Stupidity’ Defense Has a Drawback – NYTimes.com

Very funny. They won the court case, but were refused monetary compensation due to being stupid. Love it.

Potlatch for Politicians – NYTimes.com

How First Americans could help Democrats get elected next month.

After Choir Rehearsal last night, there was a crowd of people around the piano all wanting to talk to me about one thing and another. This is the hardest part of my job: dealing with people. It’s probably the part I enjoy the least. Having been around churches all my life, I like to think I’m not too bad at it. But it doesn’t come easy.

Eileen said that my son-in-law came home from his office work in China recently and proclaimed, “I hate people!” I know he doesn’t and neither do I but I do know what he meant. People can make one crazy.

I do like making music with people whom I’m sure like music. So many professional musicians I have known seem so bound up in their own stuff that’s it’s sometimes hard to tell if they enjoy music. With the people I work with at church, I often can tell they find making music satisfying. As do I.

I have been playing a bit of Chopin lately. Kenneth Hamilton mentions him and other famous pianists in his book After the Golden Age.. Yesterday when the ballet teacher asked me to play music for students to sit and think and write in the journal, I chose some Chopin Mazurkas which I dearly love.

I wonder how my improvisations are perceived by young college dancers. When i listen to new popular music these days I am often bored by the music. It seems that music is not really the most important part of what is happening. The focus is the performer and his/her life and how cool or interesting they look and are. You know, celebrity.

I can find these things interesting and sometimes do. But they aren’t really the “music” part and that’s what really interests me.

All that is to say that the materials I use in my improvisations are probably more related to simple pop/rock music which is what I suspect most people listen to these days, especially the college set.

No one remarked on the Chopin in ballet class other than the usual post rehearsal etiquette compliments.

One student this week was so complimentary he said something like “you must have a doctorate in cool improvs.” I said, “No, dude. I’m just a bar musician.”

This is not that far from being accurate. Although I am proud of my work.

I bit the bullet this week and decided to learn some organ repertoire. A week from Sunday our opening hymn is “O God our help in ages past.” The tune usually associated with this hymn, St. Anne, is recalled by a fugue melody by Bach.

So I’m learning the “St. Anne” Fugue by Bach in two weeks. That should keep me busy.

Interestingly, Bach probably wasn’t thinking of the hymn tune when he wrote his fugue. It’s just a happy coincidence. Being an old church musician, I always knew I would learn the St. Anne fugue. Now’s the time.

Eileen is back. Whew. It’s a such a relief to have her around. She is exhausted but seemed in good spirits. This morning she quietly  told me it was good to be back in her own bed. Good sign.

We got home last night around 11:30 PM. Her flight was over an hour later than the original scheduled time. I didn’t leave the house until after 9 PM. It was kind of cool to sit in the terminal with my computer and watch a simulation online of her planes flight over Lake Michigan.

I am so glad to have her back. So is Edison. He seemed almost punchy happy to have things back to normal, bouncing around our bedroom and laying on my arm and purring and generally enjoying things. Nice to see since he and I have not always had a good time without Eileen. Edison has broken two wine glasses and a martini glass pushing them over the edge of tables while I kept my downstairs bedroom door closed to him. Needless to say this didn’t make me happy.

I don’t have too long to blog this morning but I did want to point out something I noticed about the contrast between concert etiquette and funeral/church etiquette.

In his book, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance, Kenneth Hamilton again and again uses the simile that modern concert etiquette is funereal in its hushed tones and reverent attitude of the silent worshipping listener.

This week it occurred to me that worship really isn’t always like that these days. In fact my understanding of liturgy leads me to treasure the noise as evidence of being in the room with live bodies. But it’s not always a good thing. Just this week, I was at a funeral where a local attorney felt it was appropriate to raise his hand and comment during an elegy and then later literally yelled a hymn throwing the entire singing congregation (and the organist!) into a dilemma of how to sing the hymn with him.

Also an organist on Facebook put up the question, asking other organists what words they used to request quiet (funereal?) during the prelude. I thought it was interesting that this organists implied theology is that worshipers should be seen and not heard. This is something I understand as a musician, but also deplore both as a musician and someone who is interested in liturgy.

So maybe this simile of a group quiet as a funeral doesn’t work as well as it used to, eh? Our worship services are as often noisy as they are reverent and it is often our classical music concerts are more consistently hushed (and boring… Hamilton, again).

Jes sayin.

New Twists in the Ebola Drama – NYTimes.com

Some very interesting letters from Africa.

Letters: A Comedian and a Scholar – NYTimes.com

In the long synopsis of online letters in this link, I loved this: ““Sentimentality should not be avoided,” GB from PR advised. “It is one thing to feel it and another to express it and yet another to let it get the best of us.”

I have a quick involuntary sentimental response to many goofy things. Often I silently weep especially alone. But I rarely go beyond the idiot knee jerk response and recognize the banality of my feelings even as I am feeling them.

My day yesterday began weirdly. I managed to get my shit together and arrive punctually for my first ballet class at 8:30 AM. The teacher looked at me funny and then said she had forgotten to call me to tell me I wasn’t needed. “That’s alright,” I said, wishing I had known that I didn’t need to push myself the day after  church service. “Bill for it,” she suggested.

Sigh. I was thinking that when they do this, have me bill for their lack of foresight and not play, it actually raises the amount of money I’m paid per hour for playing. Right?

I’m not feeling very warm towards locals anyway. By the end of the day I couldn’t bring myself to face the scheduled AGO meeting. I know I would have benefited from listening to a discussion of hymn playing. But there was no way I could go to a local church and see a bunch of people with whom I have so little in common. Oddly, after three weeks without the love of my life (Eileen comes home tonight, yay!), I still need space from the local college and heavily influential Reformed church denomination.

I figured out that if I think about melody more, I can come up with much better improvisations when I’m feeling low. This worked yesterday in the two classes I actually played for.

After my last class, I drove to the mall area and looked for a microwave to replace our broken one. Disgustingly I found one for $49 at Walmart. I loathe Walmart but bought it anyway along with a few groceries.

Eileen has indicated I should save some apple crisp for her which of course I am doing. Unfortunately, it’s hard to heat stuff like that up without a handy dandy microwave. Plus I have been missing this feature myself anyway.  Last night I used the new machine to heat up the last of my stir fry noodles. It’s not fancy or high power but it’s just what the doctor ordered.

As I write this, Eileen is in the air between Beijing and Chicago. It is a long tedious uncomfortable flight. The least I can do is have some warm apple crisp with vanilla ice cream ready for her when she returns (along with a drink and clean sheets).

This three weeks has a been a period of distress for me. I can see that. First I had to recover from jetlag. Then I realized how little I have in common with people here. I like doing church, but the theology and pathology doesn’t attract me. The prevalence here of common attitudes in the USA (weird preoccupation with money and Jesus and hatred and fear of the other) is unsettling sometimes. There are few people here who actually talk to me about ideas or tell me what they think about things. For me these are basic attributes of a human relationship. Thank god again for Eileen.

I have purchased a copy of They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They Are Full by Mark Bibbins. It arrived in the mail yesterday. I had finished reading the library copy but was so impressed with this man’s work that I ordered my own copy. I am now reading it for second time, savoring his use of language and the terrible beauty of so many of his poems. 

Chinese Scholar Who Helped in an Escape Is Detained for ‘Picking Quarrels’ – NY

Scary stuff. They quote my son-inlaw’s former teacher, Jerome Cohen.

I am missing my wife. I guess I haven’t thought about what it would be like to live without her very much. Her family genes have a lot of good feminine longevity in them. Mine on the other hand have the actuarial predisposition of my gender combined with the fact that men don’t seem to live that long in either my mother’s or father’s family. I have already outlived two male cousins (one on my father’s side and one on my mother’s side), not to mention that my mother’s younger brother died of heart disease at the age of 57.

All this is to say, that I figure I very possibly might die before Eileen, but one never knows.

I wonder what it would be like to live without her in Holland. The last three weeks have brought home to me how little I have in common with people that I run into in this town. The internet helps of course, but having lived without Eileen for three weeks here makes me think about how alone I am here.

I am lucky to have my passions for music and literature. These are very satisfying ways for me to spend my time. I experience the arts as a conversation between myself and the creators via the creations.

But it’s not quite the same as being with breathing people who can see me somewhat as I am.

I’m not complaining, just wondering.

I have cheap valium from china been making myself some excellent food. Yesterday afternoon, I made a humdinger stir fry of green beans, julienne strips of carrots and zucchini, mushrooms, peas, onions, rice noodles, garlic and ginger. Very good.

This is the picture of it I put up on Facebooger.

On Saturday I made a killer apple crisp.

Bought some Cortland Apples which bake well.

I have been in almost daily contact with Eileen via email. She returns tomorrow evening. I think this is the longest we have been apart since we met. I am looking forward to having her around. Again, I am lucky to have someone with  whom I am so compatible.

Companionship is much more rare at this age than I anticipated. Lucky me to have Eileen!

When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 3 – NYTimes.com

Kristof nails this pretty well. My impression of white people I know is that they don’t quite get how bad it is to live in America and not be white.

Brunch Is for Jerks – NYTimes.com

I bookmarked this article not only because I enjoyed reading it, but I also liked Julian Casablancas, the lead singer of the Strokes, comment “I don’t know how many, like, white people having brunch I can deal with on a Saturday afternoon.”

I stopped exercising for a minute and put the Strokes on Spotify I so admired this comment.

In Detroit, Revitalizing Taste by Taste – NYTimes.com

Unusual look at some interesting new restaurants in my old haunts.

I was thinking about the word, supercilious, this morning and looked it up in the OED.

I think I saw this attitude on the faces of some of the players (mostly profs) at the concert on Friday evening (I do not mean you, Rhonda!). I won’t go into detail because it’s probably not that appropriate. But I was reminded of it when I read the word in this sentence this morning:

“[M]y pleasure at the piano is matched by frustration at many of the fusty rituals of modern concert-giving, in which the music is served up with the superciliousness of a sneering sommelier offering overpriced wine at a too-long-established restaurant.”

Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age:Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance p. viii

So I was looking up the word, “sommelier,” to make sure I understood it (it means wine waiter, sooprise) and I started thinking about the word, supercilious. Even though I was pretty sure I understood it, I have found it helpful to read definitions of words I know, plus check the quotes.

Checking the quotes in the OED paid off.

2004   Believer July 20/3   If Miyoshi nailed the English-prof..caricature, the next speaker..comes across as the stuffy,supercilious poseur.

It’s sometimes interesting to start with the most recent quotes since they have been added often from quotes from this century. I especially liked the next one:

1990   E. Kraft Reservations Recommended i. 10   The kind of supercilious shithead who wouldn’t deign to talk to a cabdriver.

I found myself drawn more deeply into some music yesterday. First in the morning I played slowly through Beethoven’s last piano sonata. Someone said recently in my presence that Beethoven had “invented boogie woogie” in this movement.

When I heard that I remembered what a music prof I know had said about this movement, that it was a “Jazzy” movement.

Both comments confused me so I thought I would investigate. After going through the movement slowly,  the “jazz”comment made more sense to me than the “boogie woogie” one. But neither are that helpful or even accurate from my understanding as a person who likes and performs Beethoven, jazz and boogie woogie.

The “Jazz comment” must reflect Beethoven’s use of accents on the last third of beats which might create a jazzy feel especially to a classically trained musician. But Beethoven does this sort of thing a lot. I think it could almost be understood as a signature trait of his composing.

The “boogie woogie” comment is harder to understand. I understand boogie woogie as a driving tempo with a certain bass figure that uses alternate octaves. I guess this is present in this sonata, but I have noticed Beethoven (and other classical composers of the 19th century) occasionally slipping into the alternating octaves of boogie without actually writing boogie.

Later in the afternoon at the organ console, I found myself caught up in reading a bunch of Mendelssohn and several Bach trio sonata movements. Excellent music.

I think about concert etiquette quit a bit. I wonder about it. Historically the idea of listening silently and with total concentration to a piece of music being performed is something that evolved in Western Civ in the 20th century. In the previous centuries we have records of audiences being sporadic in the attention they paid to music being performed. If it caught their attention, apparently they were more likely to stop talking for a bit but soon would resume less than full attention to what was being played.

One may think this inattention limited to the Baroque and early Classical period before the notion of making one’s money through concertizing really evolves. Certainly it’s not hard to find historical references to outrageous behavior of listeners in churches and theaters.

Writing primarily about the evolution of solo piano recitals, in his book After the Golden Age, Kenneth Hamilton describes many different venues and behaviors of listeners in the 19th Century.  In theaters (concert halls of the time), musical performances often occurred between acts of a play.  I have read in other places that symphonies were not necessarily performed with all movements in a row. Other music would be interpolated between movements.

The hushed reverence that one often experiences at classical music concerts is more of an aberration in the long view of music’s history.

Hamilton writes of the early 18th century salon performances in which “audiences simply tuned out the musicians as providers of background music to their gossiping. Charles Hallé  was once bemused to be congratulated on playing more quietly than Alexander Dreschock, who was ‘so loud that he made it difficult for the ladies to talk.'” (p. 38 in After the Golden Age where Hamilton is quoting from Hallé’s Autobiography, with Correspondence and Diaries, ed Michael Kennedy, 1896, reprint 1972, p. 100).

In the same chapter, Hamilton attributes the creation of the mythology of a hushed concert in the presence of greatness to a 1937 movie, Moonlight Sonata.

It “codifies a certain idea of what a piano recital ‘should’ be like.” It stars the great pianist Paderewski as himself. In the opening scenes, “the concert hall was actually a stage set constructed in a studio in London and the members of the audience however much they genuinely enjoyed hearing Paderewski play were extras paid to look moved, awed, and ultra-attentive. The audience listens in admiring silence to the performance of Chopin’s Polonaise [which opened the film] erupting in enthusiasm at the end.”

I only mention this because I think a lot about how people connect with music in my life and experience. I was at a concert last night at Calvin College. My friend Rhonda was playing a movement of Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Organ (which was adapted for organ and percussion).  At the end of this performance which ended the first half of the concert, the piece ends with a thunderous sounding gong. It lingered and in the resonance their rather fine hall there sounded almost like feedback. During this sound the conductor (and organizer of the percussion concert) began turning the audience and obviously signally that the piece was over. I thought it a bit odd that he had quit listening to the sound of the music.

On the first piece of the concert, several young student percussionists came onstage and took their place at their instruments arranged in a row. The conductor was in place but one young person was wandering the stage looking lost for at least a minute if not more. Finally she picked up a drum stick from a stand which she seemed to have just found and took her place. As she was moving around I wondered if her movement was sort of a conceptual beginning to the piece. But no, she was simply unprepared. I hold the teacher/conductor a bit responsible for this.

But it was their first percussion department recital and wasn’t bad. I know Rhonda played well and there was a lot of good playing of interesting compositions.

It does leave me wondering about the strong contrast between how classical music audiences treat music and the vast majority of listeners in our society who probably “consume” most of their music as I am doing so right now, listening to recordings.

Dancing to music, singing along, or making it oneself situates music more firmly in the lives of people in our culture than listening privately, in my view.

Last week, a ballet student asked me who I thought the best pianist who ever lived was. I was aghast. I didn’t know how to respond. I feebly said something about that I didn’t think like that and didn’t really have an answer. He looked disappointed.

Traffic on this blog has been unusually high this week. It hovered around fifty hits on Monday and Wednesday. Not sure what if anything this means.

My local library doesn’t seem to own the second volume of the graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. But it does own the original novel on which it is based.

I checked it out and began at the beginning. This means I am rereading the material that the first volume is based on.

I don’t think I’ve ever done this in this order, that is, graphic (comic) book adaptation to original source. I have done it the other way  from original to adaptation.

I’m not a fan of Gaiman although I do read his work on occasion. I have to say that his prose is much better than the adaption. Of course the adaption like so many of Gaiman’s projects is not one graphic artist but many. Each chapter is drawn by a different artist. They do try to be a bit consistent in how they represent main characters and such but it is bit bumpy that way.

However the main difference is that Gaiman’s prose evokes in this reader much more detail and nuance than the comic book. This may be about my lack of visual response combined with a heightened sense and love of words.

Whatever.

I have been noticing that a lot of modern poetry I read seems to conclude with what is almost a punch line. It makes sense as poets cast about for the language they speak and hear people speak which is of course inundated with popular culture references and tempos and such.

Here are some good spoilers from They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry They Kill You Because They’re Full by Mark Bibbins.

“… Jesus sure
would appreciate

how I redeem things
using like or as,

even if my cue
cards are crooked. Half the fun

of end times
is always feeling full.”

from Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 4 by Mark Bibbins

“You fish, you wish you were robots
so you could drink the crude
that robots drink. You pelicans
you turtles, you shrimp, you know
the drill: IT IS WE WHO ARE IMPORTANT
when we swim down to the holes
we’ve punched in the world
and suck the money out.”

from Historical Action Figures by Mark Bibbins

In a Gritty Hong Kong District, Demonstrators Show a Populist Edge – NYTimes.co

This article points out that protesters sang “Happy Birthday” to quell attackers. The power of music.

Why Do We Re-elect Them? – NYTimes.com

Because what we believe about them is wrong, ridiculously wrong.

Hong Kong’s Leader, on the Protests – NYTimes.com

So the leader of Hong Kong writes a letter to the New York Times. Hey, isn’t that newspaper entirely censored in China? Hey.

University Acquires Flannery O’Connor’s Papers and Effects – NYTimes.com

I do like O’Connor.