I am luxuriously laying around and reading books and goofing off online this morning (see below) and decided I had better do my blog since there doesn’t look to be an immediate end to my morning reading.

My recent renewed interest in Ligeti (and some other contemporary composers like Gwyneth Walker, Thierry Escaich, and Gábor Lehotka) has had me also renewing my interest in Paul Hindemith.

As a young man (and a very poor pianist at that point) I used to stumble through Hindemith’s Flute Sonata with my friend Dave Barber.

Eventually I picked up copies of his piano sonatas and played through much of them and other works by him. In undergraduate school (Wayne State) I learned his first organ sonata.

This was year ago. I performed it then and have since used it in church from time to time.

Yesterday I finally pulled out all of my Hindemith organ music.  My copy of the first sonata is falling apart. I photocopied it so that I could rehearse it without further wrecking my copy. While photocopying it, I discovered the last page was torn so badly that a measure was missing. In some music, one could figure out what was missing. I don’t find that as easy with Hindemith. I panicked. Darn.

Then I glanced down at the stack and there was an old photocopy I made years ago  of the page which had the measure on it.

Cool.

As I carefully worked through it yesterday I had an odd sensation. I studied this piece with Ray Ferguson. He was very good about teaching me how to  make sense of Hindemith’s instructions which are pretty general for organ music.

In other words, either there is a bit of a tradition how to make an organ piece work on an organ (what pipes to play it with) or the composer has him/herself indicated what pipes he/she wanted the piece played with.

I once wanted to change this with a certain living composer of organ music and politely emailed him a request to do so. He emailed me back and suggested that I not do it that way and that maybe I should learn and perform another of his pieces.

This left a bad taste in my mouth and I have since not played much music by this guy.

Nevertheless it is a consideration of making sense of music.

So here were notes from my lessons with Ray scribbled into the score, many if not most in his handwriting.

I felt like he was standing next to me which was a very pleasant feeling. I admired not only his considerable music skills and knowledge but he was as gracious a man as I ever met. I use him as a yardstick for much of my own behavior and not just in music.

I miss being able to consult with Ray since he died some years ago.

[WARNING: BORING DISCUSSION OF RANDOM RESEARCH FOLLOWS, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK OF FALLING ASLEEP]

Speaking of figuring stuff out, this morning I exercised a clear example of how much research and information one can obtain sitting in the living room with the internet.

I was reading along in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Dairmaid MacCulloch.

I had come to his description of the Piety movement in Germany at the time Bach was alive. Seeing Bach’s context from the perspective of the evolving Piety movement is informative. MacCulloch and his sources see Bach as struggling with the restrictions of Pietistic understandings. They see the cantatas as florid and extravagant works of art that left many listeners at the time confused.

MacCulloch simply cited “Hope, pxxx” in his footnotes.

I searched through my Kindle copy of his work (literally used the search function since people who design Kindle books have not made them easy to cross refer… the page numbers are even omitted in my MacCulloch which is kind of frustrating since he cross refers constantly by page).

Finally with a google search I determined he was citing Nicholas Hope’s German and Scandinavian Protestantism: 1700-1918.

I found this book online at Google Books and also at Oxford U.  Apparantly, there is no ebook available but one can search the google book. (When I tried to search the Oxford U version, it stopped me and asked if I had subscription or if my university subscribed to the service…. I went back to the Google book to read the relevant pages).

I thought it sounded interesting enough that I might like to hold German and Scandinavian Protestantism: 1700-1918 in my hands. Checked Amazon. Yikes, it’s expensive ($99 to $256!). Then I looked it up on Hope College’s web site.

Cool. A copy was sitting at Western Theological Center.

I thought maybe next time I was there I would look at it and this is the really cool part.

I noticed this on the page of online card catalog.

Wow. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do: somehow keep it in my hand when I drop by.

I tried it and it worked.

I love the interwebs.

Yesterday I went over to Western Theological Center and listened to Rhonda play some Bach she will performing soon. She really is a fine player and it’s flattering to be asked to do this by her. Came home and grabbed some lunch then Eileen and I drove to Grand Rapids for an appointment I had with my eye doctor.

This turned out weird. First, we are temporarily without health insurance since Eileen is officially retired and we are waiting for our new insurance to kick in. This is a matter of a week I think. So when they asked me for my insurance card I had to say (sounding like a con man) I’m temporarily between insurance companies.

Then when I was ushered into the examining room, the nurse asked me why I was there. She pointed out that it was way too early for a 12 month exam. I said that I was pretty sure I hadn’t initiated the appointment.

After some back and forth, it turned out that I wasn’t really supposed to be there. Someone had probably misread the doctor’s handwriting (when going over a chart?) and scheduled the appointment. I did have an August appointment on my calendar as did the office.

They wanted to go through the exam anyway but I demurred. Next time I go, I will  at least be insured. Not sure how much our new insurance will cover for this kind of visit, but at least it would apply to our new (large) deductible.

By the time we were safely back in Holland, I was pretty tired. I tried to muster my meager aged resources and managed to drag myself over to church to practice. Sunday’s prelude is a clever little piece by Gerhard Krapf on the opening hymntune, The Ashgrove.

I admire Krapf’s work. He tends to write in a severe dissonant style.

I remember discussing him with a music store owner once.

The store owner said he thought Krapf might be “getting better” by which I took it to mean less dissonant. I thought that was odd at the time (still do) but didn’t contradict him.

Anyway, this little trio is clever and I find it a bit tricky. He uses an invertible canon both of the hymn melody and his little ritornello ideas. I do think its cool.

My postlude is based on the closing hymn, “We Are Marching.” The tune, Siyahamba, is one my congregation seems to enjoying singing. I’m thinking of doing this at an upcoming local AGO members recital.

This video seems to be the same arrangement in the Episcopal resources.

1. What Machines Can’t Do – NYTimes.com

David Brooks points out some of the attributes of people who are curious and use the internet well.

2. Where N.S.A. Kept Watch in Cold War, Artists Now Find Refuge – NYTimes.com

Print journalism on the web seems to feel like it needs a lot of videos. I know that’s how a lot of people seem to be processing information these days, but I still usually find print exposition easier to apprehend. This article is an exception. I found the accompanying video very helpful in getting a sense of the place and the art.

It’s not only Eileen who is settling in and enjoying her retirement. I am finding myself less stressed. Some of this is inevitable because I no longer have to watch someone I love suffer from working a job which was causing her frustration (not the reading to kids but the haphazard planning and odd failures to communicate around her).

Eileen now gets to spend her time doing things like messing with her looms and I also get to have her around more. This is very pleasant for me and I am finding myself subtly energized at a time when I am monitoring my own fatigue and ability to accomplish all that I set out for myself to do (church, ballet class, learning and reading).

For example, Wednesdays are really my most full day. I arrive at ballet class at 8:30 AM and am in that building until 1 PM (with an hour break). Then yesterday I had a staff meeting immediately afterwards, met briefly alone with my boss, planned choir rehearsal, and practiced organ. This took  me until about 3:30 or so. I arrived home to find Eileen nursing a cold (“Hi, I’m going back to bed.”).

Surprisingly I had enough energy to go out and snow blow the driveway. I have that snow blowing is more physical than it looks, especially when dealing with huge chunks of frozen snow at the end of the drive. This requires chopping away with a shovel and then repeatedly thrusting the blower into the fallen chunks which are dispersed.

It would be just my luck to have a heart attack and die while snow blowing instead of the more traditional cardiac arrest when snow shoveling.

Just kidding. I did the snowblowing instead of treadmilling yesterday. By 5 PM I was soaking in sweat from exertion. No need to treadmill after that.

Eileen stayed home from choir rehearsal last night, nursing her cold. I thought we had a good rehearsal.

Afterwards, a professor from Hope told us that her sister who is a survivor of cancer put up a picture of this slogan on Facebook.

I came home and shared this with Eileen.

1. The Censorship Pendulum – NYTimes.co

Interesting that the return of one kind of censorship in China can signal the ebbing of more sinister kinds.

2. Dangerous Minds | Mind Warriors: Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Greg Barris

I watched most of this discussion last night. It’s got lots of goofiness but Rushkoff is brilliant.

My colleague, Nick Palmer, has a neat solution for my Ligeti question.

He suggested that I play the second note in the soprano melody as a dotted eighth.  He points out that is where it falls in the measure as well.

That seems like a logical conclusion to me.

Thank you, Nick!

It helps to get another person’s eyes on something like this. Now that I look at it I can see the obvious mistake was probably that a flag was left off of the D making it a dotted quarter instead of a dotted eighth.

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1. Ariel Artists » Rhonda Sider Edgington Interviews Organist Rhonda Sider Edgington

 Not sure if I have put this link up here before, but this is a good read by a colleague on organs and organ playing. Recommended.

2. Legalizing Immigrants – NYTimes.com

Governing and legislating is so complex. This letter points out how the new immigration bill contains a  “poison pill” that can easily render it ineffective.

3. Don’t Ask Your Doctor About ‘Low T’ – NYTimes.com

Some scary stuff about attempting to up testosterone levels. Yikes.

4. Delusions of Failure – NYTimes.com

This article demonstrates to me the difficulty of verifying different claims that are made in polemics.  When you add on top of this that so many people seem lazy about using their brains and their internet to ferret out accurate information,  it bodes ill for responsible citizenship.

I made a faux pas yesterday. In the Modern Dance class I play for there is an unusual mix of people. This is especially unusual here in Holland Michigan where homogeneity seems to be the order of the day.

One young woman told the class she was raised in Poland before moving to Holland as a young adult (high school?). She spoke without a trace of accent.

Yesterday I was walking past her and realized I was holding a Ligeti piano score. I asked her if she recognized the composer. She said no. I said he was a famous Polish composer.

I have been working on understanding the sixth piano etude of Ligeti which is called “Automne à Varsovie” which is translated to mean “Autumn in Warsaw.” Unfortunately I had assumed that Ligeti was Polish because of this.

Ahem. He’s Hungarian. Oops.

I owe this young woman an apology next time I see her.

I noticed she was intently copying down Ligeti’s  name so maybe she will already know I was mistaken.

I was working on Ligeti’s Etude 6 at the piano yesterday. I was diligently beginning with the last two pages as I sometimes do. I worked over the left hand several times, then the right. Except that in ms. 110 I was confused about the notation.

The second half of this measure seemed to have too many beats.

I don’t know if you can read it, but I have scanned my handwritten score of this measure. I see I have inadvertently made the last note E (with the arrow pointing to it) a dotted eighth instead of an eighth (the way it is written in the score). This would make it even more confusing.

Bah.

Usually when I find an anomaly like this, I begin trying to think like the composer was thinking or find his or her logic.  I began by analyzing the melody of this piece. Since Ligeti uses the melody elegantly in  many rhythmic transformations this didn’t help.

Then I played slowly through the entire piece hoping that when I arrived at ms. 110 the logic of how a performer would interpret the notation would be apparent.

This didn’t work either for me.

Then I googled it. I did find a very interesting doctoral thesis on Ligeti’s piano etude: “György Ligeti’s Piano  Études: A Polyrhythmic Study” by Jiwon Baik, Florida State U (link to pdf)  But it didn’t mention a typo or weird thing in ms. 110.

I just emailed some musicians I know and to see if someone has a solution or knows about this measure or sees my own error.

I finished Zuckerman’s Rewire yesterday morning. He combines sophistication about emerging global connectivity with an educated point of view. I say it that way because his combination is one I admire but fail to run across in many here in Holland. Some are educated and even pretty well educated. But they seem to have little interest in the world beyond their own little parameters. Others revel in the tech especially the phone tech, but are unsophisticated about larger contexts of history and understandings of ideas and art. Zuckerman’s combination is one I admire. My daughter Elizabeth (and her partner/husband Jeremy) share Zuckerman’s combination of sophistication and education. Elizabeth gave me my ebook copy of this book which I read.

I’m not going to review it this morning. It is an important read for anyone interested in what Howard Rheingold calls “the rolling present” or even the rolling future as it unfurls around us.

Again, big thanks to Elspeth for my copy of this book!

Marian Williams sings in the “surge” or “Doctor Watts” style in this video version. Christopher Small mentions it in his book Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music.

I love it that I could spotify the album Small cites, “The Gospel Sound,” in its entirety.

I’m not sure the YouTube Video is the exact same recording as the one on The Gospel Sound, but it is the style to which Small alludes.

Elaine Stritch, Broadway Legend: ‘Entertaining Is Hard’ – NYTimes.com

This is an interview in yesterday’s NYT. Stritch has some lovely wisdom.

She recently moved from New York to Birmingham, MI, a posh suburb of Detroit. When the interviewer asked if she missed New York she replied,

I don’t miss places. I really don’t. I get up in the morning, the sun is out, I’m a happy clam. I’m not unhappy because I’m not in this bedroom or that bedroom, or this living room or that living room. I’m going to make it work wherever I go.

I like that.

Three Composers Basking in Bach – NYTimes.com

Composers for Jupe to Spotify and YouTube.

Translations That Move – NYTimes.com

What music dancers choose to choreograph always interests me. Music for Jupe to yadda yadda.

Maturity’s Victories – NYTimes.com

Yesterday in her homily, Rev Jen (my boss) alluded to the fact that Anna was 84 years old when Jesus is brought to the temple. She said it reminded us of the importance of the elderly in our midst. Frank Bruni is not 84, but he is reflecting on getting older:

[As we mature we know] for everything that’s been taken from us, something else has been given. We don’t move as nimbly as we did. But we manage our emotions with greater dexterity. Our energy may be diminished. Our use of it is more prudent. We’re short on flat-out exuberance. We’re long on perspective.

Scribbling in the Margins – NYTimes.com

An arrogant professor caught writing in the college library books… in ink! I write in my own books, but never someone else’s.

So Percussion performs “It Is Time” by Steven Mackey – YouTube

 A link to a performance by a composer that Eighth Blackbird performed the other night. Still spending time at the piano with Ligeti myself.

A Violinist’s Triumph Is Ruined by Thieves – NYTimes.com

This “art crime” of stealing a Stradivarius begins with using a stun gun on a performer.

Justice Dept. Starts Quest for Inmates to Be Freed – NYTimes.com

It would be lovely if America looked in the mirror and understood its “New Jim Crow” of using prison and post-prison laws to repress our African American citizens.

Riz Ortolani, Film Composer Who Wrote a Love Anthem, Dies at 87 – NYTimes.com

Movies and tunes for Jupe to check out in this obit. I remember “Mondo Cane.”

The Opportunity Coalition – NYTimes.com

Some interesting advice to President Obama from the right.

We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer – NYTimes.com

CT scans.

Second-Class Noncitizens – NYTimes.com

Today’s political opposition to a path to citizenship is out of sync with democratic principles, historical practice and the vast majority of public opinion

How We View and Experience Faith – NYTimes.com

Letters about a recent article. I liked this quote from clinical psychologist, Elizabeth L. Benjamin.

Suicide bombings, denying civil rights, exporting fear and loathing to other countries, bombing abortion clinics, “honor killings,” elimination of accurate science in education — these are examples of toxic behaviors with broad impact that have been justified by religious faith.

Fun fact. The groom above is marrying an Incan princess to solidify Spain’s conquest of the area of Peru. He had murdered his bride’s uncle, the last independent Inkan ruler of Peru, Tupac Amaru.

Her  name is Beatrice Clara Coya. His name is Marcia Garcia de Loyola, nephew of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and eventual saint.

I’m reading all this in MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. MacCulloch observes that the Spanish were a bit more sophisticated and discerning about the native populations they found in South America than the Protestant English settlers in north America.

The Spanish were better prepared to distinguish between tribal and urban societies  in the new land. He notes that the “Inka grandees” are not only in traditional garb but brandish European heraldry as well.

My morning reading usually abounds in these kinds of “fun facts.” But I won’t bore you with the rest of the ones I ran across this morning. I know that my own curiosities and attractions are dubious to many.

I will point out how hearing The Eighth Blackbird’s concert on Friday night has not only pointed  me to composers they performed (Bryce Dessner, Richard Parry, Brett Dean, Steve Mackey). It has helped me stumble on to new ones (Derek Bermel, Missy Mazzoli) and compelled me to pull out my Ligeti scores.

This was especially fun yesterday. I discovered that the Ligeti that the Eighth Blackbird had performed (and which I enjoyed immensely) were arrangements of Ligeti’s piano etudes of which I own a volume.

Listening to the Eighth Blackbird’s performance had encouraged me that I might be able to approach some of the music they were playing and music of that ilk  in my own playing. This music is hard. But I have played hard music in the past. And one of the things I liked about their choices was how much the music made sense to me at a personal and professional level.

Us professional musicians get caught up in musical literature that is sometimes more boring to listen to than I like. This music is nothing like that. Also music that is created within living memory can have a compelling logic that pulls the performer inside it in a way differently from historical music. That’s a fact for me anyway.

Hence, I not only had purchased Ligeti’s piano etude volume 1, I also have his Hungarian Rock for Harpsichord. I had abandoned serious consideration of  the latter because I don’t have access to a working harpsichord right now. But good old Glenn Gould whispered in my ear that the piano is an excellent medium for harpsichord music (He actually maintained that it was a good medium for baroque counterpuntal writing. God knows he played hell out of that literature on it).

So the Hungarian Rock might sit on the piano okay after all.

 Csilla Orgel, a geologist and volunteer from Hungary looking at a rock. Get it?

Yesterday I spent a good amount of time rehearsing Ligeti’s “Hungarian Rock” and the devilish first etude in the book (Désordre). Neither piece was something the Eighth Blackbird played, but still it was fun.

So Eileen’s retirement has begun.

 We celebrated last night by going to CitiVu and then to the Great Performance Series concert of the Chicago group The Eighth Blackbird.

Eileen saw friends from work at CitiVu. One of them even bought her first espresso martini for her. We also saw people we knew at the concert.

Eileen had ordered cones of wool to begin messing with her loom.

They arrived (as she had hoped) yesterday, the first day of her retirement. This is working out well.

I have been noticing that I am being drawn to deeper and deeper learning of the music I am performing and am interested in. I have added a warm-up procedure to my organ practice. If I have time, I will play through an Orgelbüchlein piece. Usually four times. Careful repetition like this invariably teaches me something about the music I wasn’t noticing. Often this is structural things that I find I am enjoying more.

I have extended this four fold repetition to many of the pieces I am learning emphasizing those I am planning to perform the soonest. This makes rehearsal a bit longer, but I am finding that I am learning the pieces very solidly. That is gratifying.

Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting ideas about how to cultivate  one’s personal rewiring (presumably as a xenophile).

1 Monitor your own consumption of media… think about your own biases…

2. Escape your orbit slowly  … use your present interests to expand your sources is probably better than attempting a big change in behavior all at once.

3. Find and follow bridge figures

4. Seek serendipity through curators

The first one makes me think of basic behavior mod in general. If you want to change your pattern, first you need to accurately know what it is.

Number 2 is wise because we have all seen or participated in the short lived exuberance of a new behavior we have promised ourselves to cultivate only to watch it flounder over time.

A “bridge figure” in Zuckerman’s usage is someone who understands more than one culture from a personal point of view. A bit earlier he mentions that “xenophiles often get interested in other countries through a cultural product that crosses borders: sports, music, film, or food.”

These areas often have potential bridge figures that you can find out more about and follow.

People like Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist.

Finally a curator is some lesser known figure that points out stuff. I think I’m a bit of a curator. But I often find new stuff from pretty random tweets or facebooger posts of the people and organizations I follow.