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I am learning a lovely piece by Samuel Barber for Sunday. It is his Variations on Wondrous Love.

It consists of theme and four variations. I am learning three of them. When I do this, I describe it in the bulletin as “excerpts.”

The theme seems to be the original Sacred Harp harmonization of this tune with the soprano and tenor line flipped. He did this because modern ears hear the melody in the top I guess.

The motivic development in these variations is wonderful to hear and play. On such a well known tune, listeners are easily able to follow the weaving of the melody and bits of the melody that Barber uses. I marvel at how well written this piece is. So much contemporary Church Music is not that well written, so it’s nice to play and hear this kind of tonal motivic writing from the hands of a composer who has mastered his craft.

Now if I can only play it well.

My postlude Sunday is called “Palongo.” It is from “Five African Dances for Solo Organ” by Godwin Sadoh.

“Palango simply means dance music among the Yoruba in Nigerio. It is an original composition … ” writes Sadoh in his introduction.  He is a Nigerian educated both in Africa and the U.S. I am having a perverse notion to add a bunch of percussion to this on Sunday. When I first went through these pieces this summer after they arrived in the mail, I wasn’t too happy with them. But for a postlude, they fill a nice slot.

While I’m babbling about church music, I will add that I purchased two CDroms from St. James Press:

This CD rom is 79.00

53 Anthems
2 Larger Works
2 Complete Services
(with EPS and PDF files for congregational parts)
Preces and Responses
Instrumental and Organ Pieces
All the texts in a Word file
All the recordings in mp3 format

442 pages

I already own a couple of these volumes and have used much of the music in them. They come with copyright permission to photocopy however many you need for your choir. It’s a great deal.

Also ordered

38 SATB Anthems • 9 SAB Anthems
17 Two-Part or Unison Anthems (including 5 anthems specifically for Children’s Choir)
A NEW (20 minute) Christmas Cantata by Richard Shephard
Service Settings • Mag/Nunc Settings • A Children’s Christmas Musical • Brass/Organ Hymn Arrangements
Hymn Descants and Harmonizations • and Much More

over 700 pages. I’ve linked in both books, just click on the little logos above for more info so I get my kickback (okay, this is a joke…. ).  I think St. James is very superior to Paraclete Press. Both are Episcopalian publishers.  Just my opinion.

here’s the line-up so far for my choir for the fall:

Sept 7- Draw us in the spirit’s tether by Friedell

Sept 14 - Wilt thou forgive? (So giebst du nun) harmonized by Bach (Hymnal 1982 # 141)

Sept 21 - Kid’s choir

Sept 28 - Let Justice and judgment be the preparation of thy seat from Coronation Anthem No. 3 pdf by G. F. Handel

Oct 5 - Jesus, Lover of My Soul arr. by Edwin Hawkins (MaultsBy p.50)

Oct 12 - O Sacrum Convivium by Tallis pdf

Oct 19 - Give Almes of Thy Goods by Christopher Tye pdf

Oct 26 - God is Love arr. by MaultsBy

I stopped short of Nov 2 - All Saints… not sure just what I want the choir to do this day. Including All Saints, I only have four more anthems to pick out before Advent.

I wonder about my idea to make a little poster for Hope College Students. I am proud of the list of anthems above I would like to sing this fall. It seems to me like it might be an attractor for someone already predisposed to spending Sunday mornings in a local choir stall.

But I have been wrong before. Heh.

I already am losing several singers. One decided not to come back this fall. One is going to Japan for an extended visit (excuses, excuses). One has joined the local chorale which rehearses on the same night as my choir. We already are small. Sure would be nice to get some more singers. And it sure would be nice if I could count on faithful attendance of the ones who sing in the choir. I am thinking about making a sort of back-up list of anthems in case for one reason or another we can’t sing the ones above. I admit it is an ambitious list so far. I told one soprano Sunday that I am thinking of the choral literature the same way I think of my choices of organ pieces: learning that pieces that represent literature as much as possible. She seemed to approve, but we’ll see how it comes out in the wash.

Had a pretty relaxed day yesterday. I continue to feel totally spoiled between my new netbook and the piano sitting in my living room.

I walked over to the church and took the secretary some of my blueberry scones.  I spent an hour trying to pick out an anthem for Oct 5. I finally landed on an arrangement of “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” by Edwin Hawkins.

This piece is one of several that Carl Maultsby provides in his “Playing Gospel PIano: The Basics.”

This one is one he transcribed. It’s a bit simpler than the other one I had chosen for Oct 26 (”God is Love” arr by Maultsby himself).

More later on my selections for the fall choir season. I am thinking of maybe making a recruitment poster to take over to Hope College (”Hey Kids, looking for a good church choir to sing in this fall. Look what we are singing. blah blah blah”).

Took up a BLT for Eileen to eat on her lunch/supper break.

This morning I am planning to go get my Dad and make him breakfast at my house. Then off to an opthamologist appointment to finally get around to replacing the glasses he wrecked when he fell a week or so ago.

Up early reading and using my new netbook.

This is my first laptop so I am still acclimatizing to the touchpad. But it’s not too bad. I took some pics with the built in camera.

Made some blueberry scones:

I had earmarked this recipe earlier in “The Clueless Baker.” It calls for fruit yogurt. I added frozen blueberries and a bit of milk. Still waiting for Eileen to get up and give me her opinion. I tend to like all my cooking. Heh.

Reading in the Patristics for some reason.

I think my interest has been piqued by my recent discovery of the importance of the history of the Christian church in the British Isles.

I have been reading again in Trevelyan’s “A Shortened History of England” and Benedicta Ward’s “In the Company of Christ: A Pilgrimage Through Holy Week.”

I think Ward bears some responsibility of my recent interest in the history of the UK.

She keeps pointing out the historical pertinence of sources I either did not know about (Regularis Concordia and Benedictional of St. Aethelwold.)

or did not associate strongly with the UK

(Julian of Norwich and St. Augustine who apparently visited C anterbury).

Wow, how cool is this? I’m writing this entry on my new netbook.

My smarter better looking brother pointed out that Best Buy was running an instore sale. It was 350.00 which as far as I can tell is about a hundred off the Amazon price.

Apparently, my equally smart and good looking nephew, Ben, also bought one of these. So far I love it!

Survived the wedding yesterday. It is always interesting to watch family systems collide. Not that there was anything untoward about yesterday.  I had quite a bit to do in the wedding. I had to summon the same kinds of energy I use for a Sunday morning church service.

The small chapel was full and un-air conditioned. There was no p.a. and that was a blessing I think. I began my prelude with Debussy (The two Arabesques played in reverse order… that is I did the second one first) and Rameau’s “The Joyous One.”

After this, I went and checked with the MC about when to begin the requested solos. It seems that it was time.

The crowd was buzzing with energy and excitement and I never had their total attention for the first piece, “Time has told me” by Nick Drake. I managed to get them to notice me but not stop talking which was fine with me. I just look out the window and sing the song I have been asked to sing. I improvised on this tune until it was time for the family not in the procession to be seated. While they seated an elderly looking woman and then the woman who was obviously the mother of the groom, I sang “Pink Moon” also by Nick Drake. This was probably my most effective musical moment. The crowd got quiet and watched and listened with what felt like happy approval (mostly of course of the people being seated not the musical background).

I began “La Valse D’Amelie” as the bridesmaids entered as planned. The only tricky thing about this was keeping an eye on the procession and the notes at the same time. This was especially hard while the flower girls entered because they were so small I couldn’t see them only the crowds delighted reaction to their antics. They ran up and down the aisle.  Then I started “Such Great Heights.” I had only completed the introduction by the time the bride and father were three quarters the way down the short aisle. So I jumped to the chorus so that if any one was actually listening they would hear the little hook by Samuel Beam.

We actually did sing “The Love of God.” I had emailed the bride to make sure she had noticed that the first verse used the phrase, “the guilty pair.”

Even though this referred to Adam and Eve I thought it was an odd choice for a wedding. She never did respond. There was some odd energy in this service, as well. Vigorous calvinistic american religion I would say.  It didn’t make me uncomfortable. Just conscious of my own lack of identification with this point of view. Heh.

I got a bit confused about the second hymn. I thought it came after the second reading and was standing prepared to lead the cong with my banjo. The mother of the groom was staring me down with a society smile. The father of the groom launched into his sermon so I sat down. I noticed that I had missed the word “Message” in the program.

Sermons, homilies, messages, I have sat through zillions of these in my life. This one was aptly named, I think. It was an entertaining Christian look at the lives of the people getting married and provided some pretty fascinating insight into the family systems at play. I got the “message.”

After the sermon came the banjo hymn. The father of the groom told the audience to wait for me to sing the first stanza and then stand up and join me in the second and third. This was a slightly comic effect to me. But toujours gai, archy!

The next musical thing was Mallotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer” sung by a visiting soloist. This is not exactly my personal favorite, but admittedly this guy could really sing. He was obviously a trained dude and had a beautiful “natural voice” (i.e. operatic) sound. Then there was a prayer and I sang.

Not exactly a grateful moment to follow an excellent trained voice with my own on “Grow old with me.”

I had mentioned to the tenor that he should be kind to me because I wasn’t going to sing with “natural voice.” He told me it would be fine. It was fine.

Like many weddings there were two men up front as sort of leaders. One was the father of the groom, one the minister of the bride’s family. It sort of felt like battle of the ministers at the end when the minister friend of the bride’s family prematurely evoked applause with his rousing little speech for the bride and groom to kiss each other, “Jack you can now kiss your wife, Jill you can now kiss your husband.” Wild applause stealing a bit of the thunder when just a few seconds later, the father of the groom presented them to the audience.

The audience applauded anyway as they left the room. I waited until the applause just began to die down and began an instrumental version of “Secret Heart.”

During the awkward pause as the audience waited to see what comes next I switched to the full rendition of “La Valse D’Amelia” beginning with the first section with moving sixteenth notes. The crowd instantly relaxed and started to leave the premises.

Whew! Just before service a friend of the bride handed me an envelope which turned out to have my pay in cash. Hurray! I came home soaking with sweat, changed clothes and went and used the cash to buy groceries and of course gin.  It is so nice when people bother to pay the musician. I am still waiting for my church to pay me for a wedding from a week ago. But whotthehell, archy!

I often wonder why I do not suffer from more depression. I see it in my family.

I do know that composing, practicing,  and performing music is definitely a source of meaning and pleasure for me. Ran across the article, “Drawing on the Effort-driven Rewards Circuit to Drive the Blues Away” by Cathy Malchiodi this morning. Like my memory of all Psychology Today articles (my parents subscribed in the late sixties I think), it’s a bit superficial but has some food for thought.

Malchiodi is an art therapist, I guess.  I think the notion that effort-driven activity can aleiviate depression is a bit extreme. I prefer Malchiodi’s idea that it can “alter mood.”

In my case this is sometimes true, but not always of course. It would seem to me like any activity one finds rewarding can draw us out of superficial obsessive thoughts, but the deeper ones I think might require a matrix of strategies that would also include drugs, talk therapy and social contact.

Keyboard music has a strong history of being music for the edification of the performer or a few friends gathered around.

This is such a contrary notion to the cultural practices of this and the last century. First of all, the idea of the musician carries some odd connotations to many people. In the late eighties, my wife confessed to her middle school classroom students that I was a musician. They thought it was wonderful that she had married someone rich and successful. Hah! (It is to laugh).

Music education seems to see musical technique through the lens of education and the lens of public performance. Edification seems a remote end. Nevertheless, musicians love to practice which is necessarily a solitary activity. The preludes and fugues of Bach; his suites; the piano sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann; the gebraukt music of Hindemith and others are all examples of music that was conceived for the living room not the concert hall or recording. Music to do, I like to think of it.

This morning I ran across Daniel Wolfe’s 2006 composition offering, “12 kleine Praeludien.”

On his blog, he says this:

“I’ve just got round to assembling a complete PDF file of my 12 KLEINE PRÆLUDIEN (2006) a compositional project somewhat associated with my new music blogging. This collection of 12 pieces — with two alternatives as circumstances require — is intended, cheerfully, for domestic music making. The collection may be played in whole or in parts, and if played in whole, I prefer the printed circle of fifths order, beginning with Ab and ending with C#. The premise here is the notion that a prelude is a cadence elevated to a minor epiphany. Feel free to download it here.”

I like many things about this. I like that he is giving his music away to interested people. I like that the music is attractive and designed for “domestic music making.” I also like that I can view it before downloading it so I can see exactly what he is doing before committing my printer to 20 pages of paper. The music looked interesting to me. I have just finished printing it up and will start to play through it.

This is one of the many things I think the Internet does. I like it.

I have been thinking about Eckhart Tolle’s ideas he expressed recently on an episode of Speaking of Faith (transcript).

This is the first time I have heard of this man, but apparently he has a wide following.  When I heard that he was thinking about the “racing thoughts” we have in our head that keep us from living in the present moment, I correlated some of what he was saying with my own experience of performance anxiety and even life in general.

He told a very interesting story about how he experienced one of his early insights by observing a woman acting crazy on the Tube (London subway).

“I would sometimes see her on the train. I call it the tube, the subway, in the morning. And she would continuously talk to herself or, rather, to an imaginary person in a very angry voice. Continuously complaining, “And then he did this to me. Then he said, and I said — then how dare he tell me this,” and I watched in amazement how can anybody be so insane and still apparently have a job? Because she would catch the subway every morning.

Ms. Tippett: [Laughter] She was going somewhere, right?

Mr. Tolle: And one day I was sitting opposite her on the subway, and she got off at the same station that I needed to get off to go the university library. I followed her, and we got closer and closer and finally I realized, oh, my God, she’s going to the university.

[Laughter]

Mr. Tolle: Because at that time, I still thought the university was the great temple of knowledge, and the professors and so on, they had all the answers and I would eventually find them too. I was washing my hands in the bathroom and I thought, “My God. Her voice. She never stops talking.” And I suddenly realized, well, I do that too, except that I don’t do it out loud. And then I thought, “I hope I don’t end up like her,” and somebody next to me looked at me and I suddenly realized in shock that I had actually said these words aloud just like her. I said, “I hope I don’t end up like her.” [Laughter] So I realized my mind was as incessantly active as hers. Our only difference was that my thought was mostly based on feeling sorry for myself. It was kind of depressed kind of thinking. My patterns were fueled by anger. But that was only a very brief …

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Tolle: … flash of realization. But I always remember it because that was — it took years before I finally was able to really step out of the stream of thinking and realize there is a place inside me that is far more powerful than the continuous mental noise with which for many, many years I had been completely identified, just like that woman.”

Last night laying in bed, I realized how my song, “Inside Me,” seems to echo Tolle’s ideas and even this experience:

Inside me (mp3)

Alone in a crowd,
she’s talking out loud.
she draws attention to herself.

I try to stay calm.
My head starts to pound.
or something somewhere inside me.

My ears almost hear.
My lips almost speak.
It’s something somewhere
out of reach.
I can’t find the fear.
Is it fantasy?
Is it something somewhere inside me?

Intruder alert.
Perp down on the scene.
Information right there on the officer’s screen.
Border patrol…
we’re losing control.
I’m losing something inside me.

My ears almost hear.
My lips almost speak.
It’s something, somewhere out of reach.
I can’t find your fear.
Is it fantasy?
Is it something, somewhere inside me?

We’re brothers and lovers moving in a dream,
Keeping each other at arm’s length.
We’re sisters and mothers moving in a dream.
We keep our heads down.
We don’t look around.

Alone in a crowd.
I’m talking out loud.
I draw attention to myself.
He’s starting to cross.
Breaks into a run.
There’s something breaking inside me.

My lips almost hear.
My ears almost speak.
It’s something, somewhere out of reach.
I see your fear.
It’s just fantasy,
like something, somewhere inside me.

I  forgot to take my passwords with me on a recent trip and was unable to access my site. This was the reason for my reason reticence.

I was due back at around 11:15 today, but my boss took pity on me last night and told me I didn’t have to come to today’s staff meeting.

After church, Sunday I drove my Mom madly to Holly Michigan for a surprise 90th birthday party for a friend of hers.

Church was actually lots of fun on Sunday. My marimba was still in the building from my Friday gig so I used it on one accompaniment (along with guitars, flutes, and sax). On another tune (HOLY MANNA) I used two banjos and guitar and sax. My friend, Jordan, tore it up on the sax on the Poulenc and the “Molly on the shore” Grainger piece.

After the party, we went down to my brothers in Detroit. Monday and Tuesday we drove back and forth to Fenton so Mom could continue to sort through a lifetime of stuff.

I got to eat three times at the French Laundry in Fenton. I do like this place.

I took my wedding music info with me for this weekend. My friend, Megan Hunt, is getting married and made up quite a list of music for her wedding:

La Valse D’Amelie on piano

Such Great Heights

Pink Moon

Time has told me

Secret heart

Not to mention accompanying a friend of hers on the Lord’s Prayer by Malotte.

There was a bit more energy in the crowd we played for last night.

Easier to play for a bit livelier crew. We seemed well received. I was blown away when Matt Scott, the owner of Lemonjellos, handed me fifty dollars after our set. I have talked with him over the years about the idea that music is worth paying for. Not with the idea of getting him to pay me particularly, but more as a general concept. I am concerned that he loses money if he pays his musicians. The mark-up on coffee doesn’t strike me as sufficient to remunerate entertainment. This weekend, Matt has twenty acts play in his “Folking’ Awesome” localish folk americana acoustic mini festival. If he paid every act as he told me he did, he spent over 1 K on local music this weekend.  I don’t see anyone else locally putting their support so vividly behind local music. Bless him. I hope he doesn’t lose money over it.

Ironically, I still haven’t convinced the people at my church to pay me right after playing a wedding. When I asked her, my boss told me that she had already “put in” for my check and that I would probably get paid next week.  I hate money. I find it ironic that Matt from Lemonjellos handed me cash after playing and the people at my church still have to be asked before they seem to be thinking about paying me. Ah well.

I know I’m kind of in a melancholic mood this morning anyway. Grumpy gus, I guess.

I have a couple of friends who have written me recently about the troubles and travails of being gay in our society.

Sad stuff, indeed. And I wake to hear that Barak Obama is against gay marriage. Fuck him. And fuck the Christians who perpetuate this stuff. I will vote for the prick but it makes me so tired the way people blindly cater to this nonsense. Politics. Religion. Nonsense. In my opinion.

On the upside, no crazy local evangelical Christian crashed into my gigs wielding automatic weapons and shooting people. That’s good, right?

So two gigs down and a couple more things to go. This morning, my colleague and friend Jordan has consented to perform gratis at my church.  This guy is a first rate musician and really a delight to work with. He is the first musician I can recall who can follow me from the bar/coffee shop gig to my church work. From “Why did the elephant cross the road” to Poulenc. I do know a couple of keyboard players who could do this, but not instrumentalists.

After church, I will jump in the car and drive my Mom to Fenton for a party she is attending. I am planning to hole up in her old house and wait for her to be done. Then on to Detroit. On Monday we’ll come back up to Fenton to continue packing up and sorting stuff at her house.

Next weekend I have another wedding. For this one I am learning a bunch of music including “Such Great Heights,” “Pink Moon,” “La valse d’Amelie,” “Secret Heart” (instr. version), “Come thou font” on the banjo, and “Time has told me.” I am dragging along my banjo and guitar to Detroit to keep working on this stuff. I figure my weddings are paying for my “Words and Music Mostly by Steve Jenkins” gig. That way, I can break even. heh.