Spent severals hours working on this silly piece yesterday. While I did rewrite bits, I spent most of the time cleaning up the notation.  Inconsistencies in notation drive people like me nuts. Even little things like the fact that pasting and copying from my original caused some accents to look different from others (bold and jazz font vs. not bold and reg font).

I am accepting this small difference but am correcting the placement of many articulations which suddenly get a bit wild if they are copied and pasted. This takes a lot of time.

Time which I had since my luncheon date canceled due to a funeral.

This piece you may recall is one I need to get in the mail this week for a contest. It’s the first contest I can remember entering where there is no money prize only a performance.

I also haven’t submitted any work for consideration for publication or contests for quite a while. I have lost faith in my marketability in general as a songwriter and musician. I know I probably have a small number of people who might be interested in my work either as a composer or even performer.

But on the stodgy west coast of Michigan, I am an anomaly as both.  Or at least the way I do it.

I was chatting with one of the rare local (Grand Rapids) colleagues I have yesterday on the phone, when he said he could understand how locals might see me as something like a fuzzy pajama pants old guy musician.

I replied, “What’s not to like?”

Indeed.

My musical and artistic literacy goes unsuspected by many I am sure. But, “toujours gai, archie, toujouirs gai.”

And of course, My Life is Good!

After ballet class, I walked home to rehearse a Vivaldi concerto with a young viola player for Solo and Ensemble this Saturday.  Also, I received an email confirming ten vocal soloists which have hired me as accompanist through Grand Haven High School.

Originally they offered me $25 per singer.

This presumably included the rehearsal, little pre-festival public concert (a very good idea, btw) and the actual festival itself. I turned them down.

They came back and doubled their offer which I accepted. It made me wonder why they offered me such a small sum in the first place.  Annoying especially because almost all of the musicians in this area (including the teacher negotiating these meager remunerative amounts) are earning much, much more money than me.

But at least I’m learning to accept their crumbs less readily, eh?

My church had its annual meeting Sunday.  We are about 10k short of our projected 400k budget due to inadequate pledging. The financial people asked that people re-pledge at least $2 a week. Eileen and I under-pledge and over-give. This gives me some breathing room with that meager amount of money we make I was talking about.

We discussed it and decided to raise our pledge accordingly.

Very ironic, because the church not only pays me a portion of what I am supposedly worth professionally (due to degrees, experience, expertise, yadda yadda), they have frozen my wages.

Of course an increase to staff wages is part of what the financial people want to do with the missing money.  I’ll be lucky if I break even.

Also the financial person pointed out to community that the church provides no bennies (benefits like insurance) to its part-time people. They said that they are able to do this because the “husbands” of the staff all work. Otherwise they would be compelled to give benefits.

I’m comfortable with being a “wife” of Eileen. I just have the uneasy suspicion that maybe the financial people forgot about me and the other males on the staff.

The guy talking used to be in my choir until one day he  stopped showing up. Since he didn’t speak to me about it I suspect he couldn’t take the fuzzy old guy who is just too different from the people he knows.  Sigh. I guess I’ll never know since he never spoke to me about it.

He is, however, a much better financial guy than singer. I told him (unsolicited) that he was helping the church where he was and that it was probably a wise decision to move from the music ministry to the financial end of things.

I hate church.

I continue to spend time with Schubert at the piano. It helps my mental health, I am sure.

I had a nice moment at church yesterday. The postlude was a hoary old Anglican setting by C. H. Parry of a chorale prelude on the tune, DUNDEE.  Parry, Howells, Vaughan Williams and other English composers hear the organ in a sort of subdued romantic way, lush but restrained, certainly very subtle for American ears in this century.

I play these guys anyway since they are an important part of Anglican history and the organ’s repertoire (in my opinion anyway).

DUNDEE as a melody was first found in the 1615 Scottish psalter, The CL Psalmes of David.

The Hymnal Companion to the Hymnal 1982 says that though this tune was thought to be borrowed or modeled on the French Genevan style, “it is typical of the British metrical psalm-tune style, with its ‘gathering note’ at the beginning and end of each line.”  (The Hymnal 1982 Companion, Volume Three A Hymns 1 to 385, p. 261)

And the tune has a sort of regal beauty to it that Parry captures easily in his organ piece.

As I was performing the postlude, a young man from the parish came and sat near the organ. The only other person near was my wife who usually makes a point of listening to the postlude.  Afterwards, I expected him to come up and talk to me about something. I thought he was waiting for the music to stop to talk to me. Instead he gave me a slight complicit smile and went on his way.

How refreshing for me! It appears that he had just come back and sat by the organ in order to better hear the postlude.

There are many musicians in this congregation. But few of them give music in the church the attention and respect this kid did. What a breath of fresh air!

I was listening to a podcast from the Poetry Foundation this morning. I wanted to hear poet, Ron Silliman, reading excerpts from his poem once again. I guess I had been sort of mulling it over.

It’s an excerpt from a longer poem called “Revelator.” It begins:

Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’s mall lot

He writes with five words per line, sometimes even five syllables. I especially like the first line. [link to the whole excerpt]

The commentators in the podcast compare Silliman to Dickinson which got me in the mood to read a bit of her this morning. I could only find my old worn bad edition. Somewhere in this house are the complete poems in a good newer edition.

I ran across this and thought it a good morning poem:

Our share of night to bear —
Our share of morning —
Our blank in bliss to fill
Our blank in scorning —

Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way!
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards — Day!

by Emily Dickinson

I spent some time yesterday with Bach English suites and Schubert piano sonatas at the piano before and after church. When I neglect to do this kind of playing, it’s like missing prayer or exercise.

I have lunch schedule with my buddy, Nick Palmer, today. Between now and then I want to work on polishing up “Dead Man’s Pants” to submit for rejection by the Manhattan New Music Project(http://www.mnmp.org/)

Then later I have 2 & 1/2 hours of ballet class accompaniment.  I observe that in my old age (59), it is meaningful to me when people notice and appreciate my music (see the beginning of this entry). This is one of the things I like most about ballet work. The music matters. The movement is primary, but the music not only helps by marking off the movement, it also contributes as an audible reminder of the expression in the movement.

It’s so nice to be listened to when so much music is barely perceived when human ears are in it’s proximity.

Less apparent than wallpaper.

I have a theory that since the advent of recording, listeners are less aware that what they are hearing is the effort of another human since most music in their lives has come from speakers or ear buds.

Of course, it’s just my opinion, heh.

The snow falling in my neighborhood yesterday was very light and fluffy.  And it was accumulating, making a thick layer of snow so light you could practically blow it away, much less shovel it. When you looked up as you walked, there was a sheen of grainy bits of whiteness everywhere.

When you work six days a week (like I am doing now), Saturday begins to feel like a day off. I didn’t get moving until about noon but can’t quite account for what I was doing before that.  I made pretty lousy French toast for Eileen and me for breakfast.

It was probably lousy because I used diet bread and eggbeaters. Some things don’t substitute well, I guess. It was saved by excellent maple syrup (in Eileen’s case) and molasses (in mine).

I also managed to do a bit of work on “Dead Man’s Pants.” I think it is a bit quixotic to even submit my eccentric work to a New York contest.  It’s due in the offices of the Manhattan New Music Project a week from tomorrow. I may have solved the biggest compositional problem adapting it poses yesterday. My original arrangement (and it was sort of an arrangement for the available musicians) was for string trio, two saxes, piano, bass, drums, banjo and vocals. The one I am submitting will be for string quartet, piano and drums.

I had to cut one section. It’s called “Tiny Lies,” and is really just another droopy jupe type fake paul simon song. I of course quite like it. But it didn’t translate well into the required instrumentation for the contest.

I am however still asking all members of the ensemble to sing and play the last few measure of the piece. This is the way I envision the piece no matter what the arrangement. That all the players would suddenly start singing the notes they were playing with conviction:

YOU MUST BE THE ANIMAL WITH THE HUMAN FACE
YOU MUST BE THE ANIMAL WITH THE HUMAN FACE
YOU MUST THE HUMAN WITH THE ANIMAL FACE

I find these lyrics quite satisfying in this context.

I suppose it’s slimly possible that some fancy New Music New York person might like it.

Anyway, it’s a good goal for me. Another little compositional problem.

Quote for today on despair from the wonderful Adrienne Rich:

” [W]e see despair when social arrogance and indifference exist in the same person with the willingness to live at devastating levels of superficiality and self-trivialization.

We see despair in the self-hatred that clogs the lives of so many materially comfortable citizens.

We hear despair in the loss of vitality in our spoken language: “No problem,” we say, “that was a healing experience,” we say, “thank you for sharing that,” we say…

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat, is, like war, the failure of imagination.”

Adrienne Rich, “What would we create,” republished in What is Found There : Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993

I did manage to read through yesterday’s links.  Here’s a couple I have read:

Saracen International Reportedly Has Blackwater Founder’s Support – NYTimes.com

Erik Prince is from the city I live in now, Holland, Michigan. He is part of a local moneyed family. He founded a very odd and dangerous- looking organization of mercenary soldiers formerly known as Blackwater. They are still operating even though Prince I believe has decided to stay out of the USA for the time being. Their new name is Xe Services and they bear keeping an eye on.

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

A Night in Tunisia – NYTimes.com

Not sure if I put this link on the blog, but it is a vivid rendering of the frightening life on the ground in Tunisia recently.

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

Here’s a few more on my list to read.

Book Review: Books About Alan Lomax – WSJ.com

I have been a fan of Alan Lomax and his dad for years. They both demonstrated an interest in non-academic music and made valuable recordings of all kinds of musics.

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

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools by Joanne Barken

from Dissent.com. Looks interesting.

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

How novels came to terms with the internet by Laura Miller

from yesterday’s Guardian.co.uk

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

Irony Is Good!

How Mao killed Chinese humor … and how the Internet is slowly bringing it back again.

BY ERIC ABRAHAMSEN

self-explanatory

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

and don’t forget

Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Books, articles, and a blog by the music critic of The New Yorker

Last night, I settled in & did some tv watching while Eileen treadmilled. I checked on C-Span to find that it was covering an interesting summit of organizations (Coffee Party, Fix Congress First & others). The speaker on the live coverage was another hero of mine, Lawrence Lessig. I was interested in what he would have to say.

Turns out he is now involved with creative solutions to fixing the broken US government.  Very cool. Since this was just yesterday, his speech seems to only be available at the C-Span site.  Here’s the link: Ethics in Politics, Jan 21, 2011.

Let me summarize quickly what he seemed to be saying.

A) the government is broken by the open control moneyed interests seem have on it, this is a new historical kind of open corruption;

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

B) the design of democracy is that the main influence on congress be the people of the country (He quotes Federalist 52: “…the federal government which ought to be dependent on the people alone”;

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

C) this is a problem for all political interests, left and right;

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

D) there have been times in history when the people voted progressively, though admittedly this was between parties (the1912  election of Woodrow Wilson over Teddy Roosevelt, both ran on anti-corruption and between them received 70% of the vote);

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

E) there is a way to rechannel the influence of the people back into the system.

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

Lessig supports the idea of the “First Fifty Dollars” program. The idea is that the first $50 of each taxpayer’s money paid to the federal government would be allocated as public election money. Each taxpayer would designate which candidate received this money(This would address objections to funding people one disagreed with). Candidates could opt into the fund voluntarily but would then be committed to using only dollars from this fund. This would include but be limited to an additional $100 possible from each taxpayer.

This would raise enough money to make it attractive to candidates.  ($6.1 Billion according to Lessig).

I’m probably not reproducing his ideas 100% accurately, but I would recommend you take time and listen to his entire speech.

I especially liked that he said that the corruption is a problem for those all along the political spectrum at this point.

He chided his liberal audience for not supporting the Tea Party when they had things right (anti-Earmarks, the Independent Office of Ethics in Ohio).

He said both the left and the right are being blocked by the corruption in government right now.  He is looking for principled opposition between competing ideas that is freed from the corrupting influence of money on our government. I can only applaud this.

I was interested to see that one speaker at the summit, Michael Ostrolenk, was referred to as  a respected conservative.

I was even more intrigued by the name of his organization: the Transpartisan Center.

Here he is talking a bit about this stuff: Intro to Transpartisan Thinking. Tried to embed this silly vimeo but it resisted me.

|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Anyway, here are a few more links for today:

Test-Taking Cements Knowledge Better Than Studying, Researchers Say – NYTimes.com

This is funny to me, because I have been pointing out for quite a long time that tests are more effective teaching tools than accurate eval tools.

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

Republicans Plan Their Own Health Bills – NYTimes.com

I’m glad to see that the right is at least cherry picking the bill they hate.

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

Reynolds Price, a Literary Voice of the South, Dies at 77 – NYTimes.com

I like this writer quite a bit.  Sorry to see him go.

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

George F. Will – Hubris heading for a fall

Will only points out the public sector half of the problem but that much is true. The private  sector is equally culpable in my opinion… as that terrible man Obama said recently, “how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”

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

And here are a couple of links to writers admittedly on the left side of the spectrum (which is probably where I spend more of my time). Haven’t read them yet but have them bookmarked for future reading:

Obama’s Deregulation Dance With Wall Street | The Nation

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

How Sargent Shriver Helped John Kennedy Become a Liberal | The Nation

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

Yesterday in my beginning ballet class, the teacher asked me if I would step on the floor and partner with a student in an exercise. This is hilarious and fulfills many of my acquaintances’s visualization of me, an old fat guy, in a ballet class. I, of course, did so much to the class’s amused approval.

The exercise was one in which two people kneel facing each other, align their spines, and gently push each other with the top of their heads.

Then the teacher for some reason used me to demonstrate the next exercise where one partner gently places his or her hand on the top of the person’s head while standing and keeps it their as the person slightly bends their knees.  Again this is about alignment.

They spent most of the hour doing all sorts of these kinds of exercises.

They have been doing an exercise which involves in succession 6 steps, turn; 5 steps, turn; 4 steps, turn; 3 steps, turn; 2 steps, turn; turn, turn.  In their first class I was asked to improvise music to fit this rhythmically. Which I did. Then, in each succeeding class, the teacher returned to this exercise. I repeated my improvisation a couple of classes, then changed it, then decided it might make a neat compositional problem to write a melody that would fit this and still be easy for the dancers to hear the changes in.

I was playing through this when the teacher arrived yesterday. She immediately figured out what I was doing and told me it was the first time anyone had written a melody to fit with this exercise.

Of course, since I was prepared, the rule applied and we didn’t get to it in that class. But maybe next time.

Today’s link is to an article written by Bono: What I Learned From Sargent Shriver – NYTimes.com

In case you haven’t noticed Sargent Shriver died. He was instrumental in the making of the Peace Corps and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”

I liked this quote in his obituary:

Break mirrors, Mr. Shriver advised graduating students at Yale in 1994. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘Shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor and less about your own.’

But what caught my eye in Bono’s article was the fact that he quoted Sebastian Temple’s goofy rendition of the lovely Prayer of St. Francis.

Bono mentions Shriver singing this song as a good Catholic. Yikes! I have led congregations in this song many times. It is indeed beloved. I like to think it’s because of the words not because of the inane melody by Sebastian Temple. (I think it’s goofy whether Sinead O’Connor, the choir of Westminster Abbey or Susan Boyle sing it.)

I remember listening to Sebastian Temple’s rendition of it when I first started playing it. He did it in sort of a goofy calypso.

As I read Bono’s description of how Sargent Shriver and his wife mentored him and Shriver’s son as they developed international charity programs,

I couldn’t help but wonder if Sebastian Temple would have gotten a thrill out of Bono mentioning his song.

I woke up early thinking about poetry.  It is in the cracks of life that I find my meaning. This is probably why I like accompanying ballet so much, because it is such a small and delicate thing to provide the musical framework for strenuous careful physical poise and activity.

These cracks contain the poetry of life for me. I recall once again a high school teacher who used to pompously proclaim read poetry not the newspaper, more meaning and reality in the former.

Now I read both. And I realize that many people do neither.

Here’s a poem by Elizabeth Alexander,

the poet who wrote a poem for Obama’s inauguration:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'"),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I'm sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

This morning I listened to a podcast of Alexander reading this poem. link to hokey religious radio show I have lately become enamored of)

Later she says this:

“.. my poet self, she’s all intuition. There’s no program. She’s just, you know, doing as Adrienne Rich says, diving into the wreck.

Her job, again, to quote that great poem from Rich, she says, ‘I want the wreck itself, not the story of the wreck, I want the wreck itself.’ “

Which got me thinking. I think I like “living in the ruins” (reminds me of the title of a great novel by the Southern writer Walker Percy which I quite like)…

I also am all intuition and creative understanding and want the wreck itself.  Here’s a link Rich’s entire poem.  She is someone I have read and admired.

Poetry is my oxygen.  It’s what I find in those cracks I mention above, in the people who are forgotten and even invisible.  I am becoming one of them. Gratefully.

Jupe

There. I thought I would quote myself. Heh. Well enough of this.

I did some composing yesterday, working on tidying up “Dead Man’s Pants” which I may get finished in time to submit to a composition contest.

Wrote a little melody for today’s beginning ballet class that had to be done in the successive time signatures of 6,5,4,3,2,1,1, in order to fit the combination.

Spent an hour in a church committee meeting.

Then a couple hours of ballet-class-accompanying interrupted in the middle by a class discussion of a dance concert I recently attended.

Very interesting to sit silently in the back and listen to what students have to say about other students’ choreography and dancing. I also watched the teacher closely as she led them through the discussion. As dancers, these students are careful observers of the dance.  They admired the performance but could detect incongruities in it and even speculate about the possible intended ideas of the design of the dances.

They of course know the performers and that helps.

I was struck by the diversity of opinion and understanding as well. From one student who objected to the use of street noise as music for a dance until the second half of the piece involved music to another student who said the dance to the noise was one of her favorites on the program (me, too, I thought silently).

The teacher told me later I was welcome to join in the conversation. I told her I was curious to hear what the students and she had to say at this point.

I didn’t say that I am a fourth of the way into a history of dance and am learning quite a bit. Knowing something of the history of music and literature it is interesting to walk through the same time span from a new point of view that weaves in and out of the familiar.

I have thought about dance most of my creative life, beginning with a little song I wrote years ago. I sometimes say to musicians, “Music is gesture. How can you interrupt a gesture in a performance, an action, just because you played one wrong note or rhythm?”

I realize now that I was assuming a lot about movement, most of it justified but not thought through. Now I am thinking about body and movement.  With the body as instrument, the artist approaches a unity and coherence of human beauty that appeals to me at the most inner core.  It’s where I love music and poetry.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I now have my only 8:30 AM ballet class. I like getting up and bundling and walking through the brisk Michigan winter morning to class.Yesterday my little Christian college was one of the few schools that stayed open locally.  The snow was heavy and wet with a last layer of freezing rain.

Later when I was walking to get my car from the shop I noticed a man and two children making a huge snowman. Great weather for that.

Behind the snowman was a very cleverly made igloo consisting uniformly shaped large snow bricks obviously made from packing them into the same box object.

I decided to play a composition by an old classmate of mine for the prelude this Sunday. The composer is Lynn Trapp.

The piece is based on a pop-music-like Spanish ballad sometimes called Fishers of Men.

It reminds me a bit of pop Spanish music tunes like “Guantanmero.”

Not quite as good as that, actually. Anyway,  there seemed to be a coda sign missing from Lynn’s composition. I figured out a solution for this notation glitch, but I thought it would cool to email him and give him a chance to let me know exactly where the coda sign went.

His website was easy enough to find. But oddly there was no email for him. There were phone numbers. But I hesitated to call over such a small little thing. Often my friends from the past are not all that happy to hear from me. Ahem.

It said that Lynn was a director of music at a church. He is a life long church musician so that was not surprising. I tracked down the church and found an email for him on its website. But it bounced back. Ah well. Fuck it.

For Eileen’s supper last night I improvved a white chicken chili after studying other recipes. I combined Eileen’s favorite bean soup recipe with chicken and bacon.

In keeping with being a total doofus, I am proudly posting the recipe.

Chicken White Chili – adapted from another recipe by SBJ, 1/18/2011

1 Can of great white northern beans
2 med potatoes, grated
½ onion, grated
2 C chicken broth from boullion, divided
1 t cumin
juice of half of a lime

1 Chicken breast, fat trimmed and sliced thin
2 T olive oil
1 slice center cut bacon
2 cloves garlic, peeled and diced
1 t chopped jalapeno pepper (opt.)

combine beans, potatoes, onions and 1 C broth. Add cumin and lime juice. Cook until potatoes are soft and mushy. Add 2nd cup of broth as needed.

Slice chicken breast and toss with olive oil. Refrigerate.

When potatoes are about done,  start bacon in cold pan. Cook bacon until done, then remove to drain. Add jalapeno pepper and garlic and cook for 2 or 3 minutes.

Add chicken and more oil as needed. Cook chicken until it begins to carmelize.

Add chicken, jalapeno pepper and garlic  to pot.

Makes about three large servings.

Yesterday’s Links

Barack Obama: Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System – WSJ.com

I have to admire Obama’s governing style. Reaching out to our weird
angry exploitive business community in the US after they trounced his
ass in the last election. Must be for the good of the country.

On a similar note, I emailed my house representative yesterday, gently
imploring him to consider not voting yes to repeal health care. Ha. This
area of Michigan is so Republican and reactionary it makes my head
spin. Anyway, I tried to be civil and coherent. Couldn’t hurt, I guess.

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

Amy Chua Is a Wimp – NYTimes.com by David Brooks

Speaking of conservatives, Brooks writes about the necessity of
socialization to cognitive learning and processing. Good stuff:

“Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.” David Brooks, “Amy Chua is a wimp”

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

News Is Power in Washington, and Aides Race to Be Well-Armed – by Ashley Parker NYTimes.com

This is an interesting description of how young ambitious aides get up
very very early and scour the internet for the latest breaking ideas and
news for their bosses.

“There’s no news cycle anymore…” David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa quoted in Ashley Parker’s article above

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

And here’s one I haven’t read yet, but plan to:

Boston Review — Stephen Steinberg: Poor Reason (culture of poverty)

Steinberg apparently teaches at Queens College CUNY. His area of
expertise is race and ethnicity in the US. I think the point of this article is to
further refute that some kind of black culture in the US contributes significantly
to poverty. As I said I haven’t read it yet.

I forgot an appointment my Mother had with her shrink yesterday. They called and we managed to rush over for a rescheduled appointment.  I ended up pretty much off balance for the rest of the day.

I had begun the day rewriting a piece I am considering submitting to composition contest. Then I got to thinking about it and recordings sitting on my hard drive of it.

I did some editing of the recording of the live performance.  I trimmed the beginning, turned down the volume in the last minute or so when the entire mix changes (you can still hear it) and snipped out a split second of silence that occurred inexplicably in the middle.

It’s still a humbling experience to listen to a recording of yourself in a live situation, not thinking about being recorded only the music you are trying to make.

It’s tempting to not share such a recording.

But my audience really only consists of my extended family (some of them) and a few local acquaintances and I do know that a few of them have a mild curiosity about this sort of thing, so fut the whuck.  I put it up on Facebook and posted it here.  Click here for the mp3

This morning I am tired and sore. After a long day, I did the wii exercise bit for a half hour then my usual forty minutes on the treadmill.

I certainly don’t feel up to working on my composition this morning. Maybe later today.

Links I have clicked on recently:

Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope – NYTimes.com

Chinua Achebe the great novelist outlines history
of and hope for Nigeria.

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

Darkness on the Edge of the Universe – NYTimes.com

The universe is riding the wave of its own expansion
enabling it to impossibly travel faster than light.
Fascinating explication and sci fi like stuff.

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

Polish Apple Pancakes Recipe | Taste of Home Recipes

Yesterday’s breakfast.

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

Send Huck Finn to College – NYTimes.com

Lorrie Moore says Huckleberry Finn is too hard
for high schoolers due to its actual complexity.
She also recommends better things they might read.

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

Hereville preview — the first 15 pages

The last graphic novel I read.

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

Barber Excursions – No. 3 – Piano World Piano & Digital Piano Forums

An interesting discussion of a piece I have been playing.
The third movement is incredibly difficult due to the composer
demanding a seven against eight rhythm.
All for the cowboy tune of “On the Streets of Laredo.”

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

GOD’S ACTION IN THE WORLD – John Polkinghorne

Still thinking about this guy. Interesting talk he gave in 1990.

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

I’m toying with submitting a revision of a composition I wrote last year to a contest. The contemporary classical music website Sequenza 21 (http://www.sequenza21.com), in partnership with Manhattan New Music Project(http://www.mnmp.org/) is calling for scores for a 2011 concert of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble – ACME (http://acmemusic.org).  (Click here for the info)

The instrumentation is string quartet, piano and percussion.

“Dead Man’s Pants” the piece I wrote last year for my dead father, fits easily into this ensemble.

There is one section I would have to omit, however, which is the banjo song, “Tiny Lies.”  This leaves three other sections which I think would work.  I began goofing around with it this morning.

The last section does have words. My original intention was that all players in the ensemble would play and sing the final text, so this would still work. The text, in case anyone is actually reading this and might be at all  interested is:

“You must be the animal with the human face
You must be the animal with the human face.
You must be the human with the animal face.”

I actually don’t think I have a snowball’s chance in hell that my little provincial score would appeal to a sophisticated New York crowd. But I felt that way about the last score I entered into a contest and it surprisingly placed second. This was some years ago for an American Guild of Snobby Organists contest. The piece was an almost jazzy setting of a psalm text for choir and organ. My feelings that it might not be a learned musician’s cup of tea were later born out when I showed it to the choral conductor at the local Christian college for possible performance with his silly college choir. He thanked me very much and never mentioned it to me again.

But whothehell. The problem is that the deadline is January 31. So that doesn’t give me much time. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of composing. I actually wrote out a percussion part for the original performance but then encouraged the player to improvise his own, so I have a written percussion part. I would have to rescore it for just string quartet instead of string trio and 2 saxes, but that actually would be pretty easy because there are never more than four independent lines in the composition.  The piano part would essentially stay the same.  I would have to compose at least one transition to cover the omission of the “Tiny Lies” section of the original piece:

The original structure was this:

Dead Man’s Pants theme: ms. 1-28
“Small Rain” theme ms. 29-57
“Tiny Lies” song ms. 58-239
“Small Rain” thematic material 240-275
“Dead Man’s Pants thematic material 276-287
“You must be the animal” section 288-320

I know this all pretty abstract without hearing the piece, but it’s what’s floating around in my head this morning. (Here’s an update from later this same day. I broke down and made an mp3 of the horrible recording of the decent performance from Aug of last year.
Click here for the mp3.)

I had fun at church yesterday.

My prelude was “Wondrous Love: Variations on a Shape-note Hymn,” Op. 34, (1959) by Samuel Barber. This piece was a bit of a challenge on such a small instrument, but I was pretty satisfied both with my registration (what pipes I chose to use) and my execution.  The choral anthem was little more than a slight arrangement of a modern hymn tune setting (tune: ST. ANDREW by David Hurd) of the old sawhorse text: “Jesus Calls Us.” I thought it was a pretty decent arrangement because I divided up the choir and had a solo soprano begin the piece, added the rest of the women, Men on the second verse and so on. I composed a descant for the last stanza and the congregation was invited to join in.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the composer would think of what I wrote to go with his tune.  I recently had a bit of an email exchange with him in which I asked for permission to re-register one of his organ compositions so that it would be doable on my small organ. He said he would prefer that I not perform it. So I didn’t.

This left a rather odd taste in my mouth about contacting the dude. So I probably won’t share my descant with him.  I don’t want to find out out that he objected to me doing that as well.

The postlude was the “To Go Out” section of Virgil Thomson’s Church Wedding Organ music. It didn’t go as well as the Barber, but I admit I sometimes “husband my resources” and concentrate on the prelude because sometimes people actually listen to it; the postlude, not so much.

One person did tell me they noticed the title (“To Go Out”) and thought it was cool. I also like the title quite a bit and it was part of why I chose to learn that movement.

The after service choral rehearsal also went well. It was a completely different group of people (as usual). I had two more male singers, plus my new soprano and several absences of other people. I enjoyed the rehearsal quite a bit.

Yesterday afternoon, I “facebooked” a blog post from an author who was experiencing copyright trauma yesterday.

Her name is Saundra Mitchell and here’s a link to her very interesting description of having many readers but no sales.

Interesting ideas on Krista Tippett’s NPR show newly christened “Being’ (formerly called “Speaking of Faith). I admit that I am still somewhat chagrined as I find myself drawn back into religious stuff via the constant renewal of my interest in church music and continuing to stumble across ideas that connect me with spiritual thinking.  But I must conclude that my personality which seems to be one of struggle with understanding and meaning inevitably somehow connects with spirituality and ideas of greater meaning and that’s just who this dude is.

Tippett’s current program is an interview with scientist/theologian John Polkinghorne. I was listening to the podcast this morning when I realized that what he and Tippett were saying about one aspect the nature of evil hit me as completely logical and inevitable.

The idea that there is a dark side to all possible sequences of events. That life is not only clockwork (like the rising of the sun and the orbits of the planets)

but also is clouds (chance and fractals).

And that the  freedom and unfolding of uniqueness inevitably leads to the complete gambit of possibilities which are logical and inherent.

So if tectonic plates behave the way they do, they shaped the form of the continents we have on earth to day but also create tsunamis.

You can’t have one without the other.  If all possible permutations of living cells are possible (and needed) for evolution, there will be some cells that run amok as cancers as well as cells that evolve into sentient beings.

I’m not being as eloquent as the learned Dr. Polkinghorn. You might want to listen for yourself. Link to “Being” show called “Quarks and Creation.”

It is along these same lines that I was mildly astonished to find myself reading in the 1929 collection of journal entries of a young minster in Detroit named Reinhold Niebuhr called Leaves from the Notebooks of a Tamed Cynic.

It’s an old paperback which has been sitting around my life for years, I’ve always meant to read.  I get these hungers for poetry and meaning sometimes just like I get hungers to read books that have information about history and people (like Apollo’s Angels).  Last night I just happened to pick up Niebuhr’s book.

I am interested because he seems to have been a healthy influence on religious thought. He also filled the pulpit in a downtown church in Detroit from 1915 to 1928.  I spent some time myself in downtown Detroit in 80s  attending Wayne State U. I also worked in downtown church (First Pres) for about a year during this period.

Here is the first sentence (on page 13) that leapt off the page at me:

We are a world-conscious generation, and we have the means at our disposal to see and to analyze the brutalities which characterize men’s larger social relationships and to note the dehumanizing effects of a civilization which unites men mechanically and isolates them spiritually.

The words, presumably written in the original 1929 edition, could have been written last week as we seek to understand our violent nature as humans and the impact of an increasingly present technology in so many aspects of our lives in the first world.

Speaking of this tech, yesterday I spent a half hour or so in front of the Wii. Eileen borrowed a fitness Wii CD rom and physical platform.

The program told me how much I weighed, asked me to set a goal for getting my weight out of the obese range, taught me some yoga poses all involving a bio feed back on balance (since I was standing on the platform), walked me through several games which involved co-ordination and body balance.  Pretty cool.  When we get money again (right now we are temporarily cash poor) we will buy this dang thing.

Eileen and I went to a dance concert last night.  The group calls itself “[Undefined] Movers.”

They seem to be made up of college age students, probably all from the local church oriented college, Hope College, where I now work part time.

Here’s a quote I found on their website:

“We mourn for the scarce appreciation for art in this country. We mourn for those who never got the chance to dream like we are dreaming. But through and within and between the mourning…we move.”

From the program for last night:

“The members of [undefined] movers. decided that they had creative dreams inside that needed to be voiced. Most college students who have felt this pull waited until after graduation to begin their journey, but we could find no reason for waiting. After careful thought, conversations, and planning, we decided to embark on this rare opportunity and take a step outside of what an average college student does. This company offers a chance to give back to the communities that have supported us so extensively. Our vision is to combine various art forms in order to create performance art that enriches the community and develops mature and innovative minds. We are looking to blaze our own trail and set off on a journey where few have ventured. We couldn’t pass up an opportunity such as this when we hold such passion in our souls.”

The program consisted of seven pieces. All included dance, three used live music (jazz quartet, an unaccompanied duet of women singers, and tenor saxophone), one used sculpture, one used recorded street sounds (my favorite), one used a loop of Robert Frost reading his famous poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Two used pre-recording music: a song by Zero 7 and a piano piece by Ludivico Einaudi. I liked the Zero 7 song which was very upbeat and provided music for a playful quartet of dancers. The Einaudi seemed very new age to my old ears. I know that this kind of music has a lot of meaning for people, but it kind of bores me.  Here’s a link to a youtube recording of his work. I don’t think that’s it’s the actual piece, but the pianist (Jeremy Limb) is the same.

The music was well executed. The duet sang a song by the group Saving Jane. I heard someone behind me murmur that it was their favorite song or that they just love that song or something to that effect.

The dancers’ movements seemed graceful and well executed to me.  I will be interested if I overhear any discussion or critique of their work. I know last night’s concert was an assignment for one of my Ballet classes to attend and analyze. That’s how I found out about it.

I made a quick pizza (using cheapo grocery store premade dough) for Eileen and me last night. We watched a couple of old Jon Stewart’s and then went to the concert. We had planned to drive to GR to meet with some friends but begged off due to the weather (which of course wasn’t quite as bad as predicted, but still it’s wise to be safe). But we still decided to go over to 8th street and attend the free dance concert.

It looks like I’m developing a morning routine to listen to the Writer’s Almanac first thing.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday.  Good quote from the Writer’s Almanac website:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” M. L. King, Jr.

I was thinking yesterday about my own conscientious objection to the conscription of the Vietnam war.  I distinctly remember that phase of my life. I was interviewed by the local draft board. I had written a letter explaining that even though I felt I was too young to have to make the discernment, that as best as I could understand it, I morally objected to war in all its incarnations.

Interestingly the draft board did little more than try to provoke me to respond to them with anger. I didn’t. I got my C.O. (as we called the conscientious objector classification). I still morally object to war, but know that it can be complicated. Cynically I wonder if the fact that my father was a minister had anything to do with being granted the status.

Today is also the tenth anniversary of the founding of Wikipedia.

There is an interesting prose piece on the Writer’s Almanac about this.  They don’t provide a permanent URL but here’s the link to their site. If you are accessing this after Jan 15, 2011, you might have to click through their archives to find it.

I remember when Wikipedia began gaining some online credibility. I resisted the concept until I realized that my experience with all reference books indicated that they were riddled with errors. Sure enough, in the article on today’s site, they say this:

[One]” ..  major criticism is that Wikipedia is inaccurate, which would make sense since there are no credentials required for writers. However, a study published in Nature compared the accuracy of Wikipedia to the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica, and was surprised to find that the accuracy was comparable — on average, about three errors per Britannica item and about four errors per Wikipedia item.” The Writer’s Almanac Website

There is a fun story about someone who tried to see if he could seed Wikipedia with a fake quote from a composer who had just died in 2009. Of course, he found his quote in some humorous places, including the prestigious Guardian U.K. newspaper. The latter was one of the few sources that printed a retraction when the perpetrator let it be known what he had done.

The quote stands as a good synopsis of Harold Reingold’s “Crap Detector” approach to the Internet:

“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.”

Editor of the Guardian newspaper on finding it had used a badly attributed quote from the Internet.

I accompanied a different teacher yesterday at Ballet class. It was the Ballet III class and the first meeting of it for the semester. The teacher and I had never worked together before but I found it easy to understand what he needed from the music and improvised accordingly.

Before the class I had been flirting with the mild depression that I sometime get. After the class during which I stayed creatively alerted for about an hour and half, I deflated into deeper melancholy which really didn’t lift until after experiencing the dance concert in the evening.

Not sure what that means, if it means anything at all.  It was similar to what sometimes happens to me on Sunday afternoons after church. I think it has something to do with the creative process and the energy I put in to it.

Here’s a post script: Today is also the date that Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time premiered in 1941 with POW Olivier Messiaen at the piano. From Composer’s Datebook web site…. another good one for Jupe.

I’ve been pretty lucky the last few days to run across a lot of new music.

The people I follow on Facebook often embed a video. I usually at least listen to the video. If I like it or am interested in it, I download the video and then rip an mp3 of the music.

For example, an young acquaintance of mine put up this video.

I’ve never heard of the band American Football, but according to Wikipedia they are an Indie group active around the end of last century.  I was drawn to the sound of changing meters in this song.

A few days earlier, my niece tagged me in a message recommending the band, Black Prairie. I found this on youtube.

I have long been a listener to KCRW and was happy to find that they posted videos of live in studio bands. And I liked Black Prairie quite a bit.

I checked out some other KCRW videos on Youtube and found this:

Which I quite like. I found a couple of other bands I liked but soon discovered that a lot of the music in the KCRW videos did not attract me. But what the heck.

I also found several trax on Utne’s monthly music sampler. This selection only stays up for a month. But while it’s up, you can download mp3s of music they recommend.

From the January selection, I pulled down these.

“Electricity Turns Them On” by Wires.Under.Tension

“Wrong Piano” by Cowboy Junkies

“Joyride” by Dave Holland and Pepe Habichuela

These links are temporary.  And they are not all I downloaded, just the ones I find that I like.  I saw Dave Holland playing with Christ Potter and others last year. Very impressive.

Here’s a couple that my nephew put up on Facebook.

New music for your eyes and ears. Life is good.

I have now served as piano accompanist for all three of my classes this semester: Beginning Ballet, Ballet II, & Pointe Class.  This morning I have an 8:30 AM Beginning Ballet class. Tomorrow my Ballet II class is canceled but interestingly I have been asked to accompany one of the other teachers’ class. They didn’t tell me what class it is. But I immediately agreed.  I enjoy this work and am learning a great deal. Much of what I am learning is applicable to music and living in general.

Also, I continue to read Apollo’s Angels.

I had a brief conversation with one of the ballet teachers about this book. She said it was on a poster in the hall and that she was planning to read it. I fumbled about saying that the author had some interesting takes on ballet that I questioned. She said, “Like Ballet is dead.”  I nodded. Her take was that what the author was defining as ballet was very narrow and traditional. She also said we now have no Ballanchine which she said was the musical equivalent of having no Schoenberg.

I responded that I wasn’t looking for a Schoenberg, that I thought art was fragmenting, decentralizing, in an interesting way. She gave me an odd look when I said I liked new music.

When I mentioned the recent NYT articles on Nutcracker Ballets presented this past Xmas, she didn’t seem too enthusiastic. A period piece, she called it, even though I said the point of the article was the many varied interesting takes different dance troupes had taken on it. I didn’t go on to say what I was thinking,  that it was good evidence that Ballet wasn’t dead. Out of my depth.

I continue dipping into Zuckerman’s Wisdom. This morning I read part of Alan Arkin’s section.

I found his ideas about collaboration interesting and filed them away for thought:

Collaboration doesn’t work when you hang on to your vision as if it’s what God is waiting to hear and learn from. But a good collaboration is when you’re willing to sacrifice and throw your own view out for something that’s more exciting or more interesting.

A young musician once told me of his disappointment in his fellow musicians when they weren’t flexible enough to experiment musically in public spontaneously or follow each other when someone started changing something.

Collaboration is something I tell myself I am interested in. But I’m not ready to throw all of vision away, just take risks. As I said I will be thinking of Arkin’s comments.

Another thing he said, I found interesting:

We’re brought up in a culture that tells us, ‘You are what you do.’ When people say, ‘Tell me about yourself,’ we immediately talk about career, as if that is a complete and perfect definition of who and what we are. In many parts of the East this is not the case. Someone will say, ‘Tell us about yourself. Are you a painter?’ And the response will be, ‘No, I paint, but I am not a painter.’ There’s a recognition of the separation between who the person is and the activity they’re performing. They are a person and they are just doing something. That was a big lesson for me, recognizing that I am something other than, and maybe more important than, what I do. To learn not to define myself by what I do for a living and that my work is an outgrowth of who I am, rather than it being the reason for who I am.

I have thought about this as well. When I make music,  I find it helpful to try to just “be” in the music, not think, but just “be.” And I have thought often about what it means to “be” as opposed to “do” or even think in words.

This morning, I checked on the daily Writer’s Almanac on NPR even though I am subscribed to the podcast.  (Did you know today was Horatio Alger, Jr.’s birthday and that he resigned in disgrace as a minister after having been accused of having sexual relations with some young boys in his congregation?).

At the bottom of the page was a list of other websites from American Public Media. One caught my attention. It was called “Being.” I clicked on it and found to my chagrin that the old NPR religious show “Speaking of Faith” had changed its name to “On Being.” I keep getting sucked back in to religion. Yikes!

I have performed most of Samuel Barber’s variations on Wondrous Love for organ before.  But it occurs to me that repeating excellent music is not a bad idea. Also I didn’t learn the last variation last time I did this at church. So I have scheduled this one for Sunday.

We are singing “What Wondrous Love is This” as the second communion hymn Sunday. We are also singing David Hurd’s lovely little melody called St. Andrews as a choral anthem.  The words are “Jesus Calls Us; O’er the Tulmult.”

I was pleasantly surprised when several members of the choir seemed to know this lovely obscure little tune.  I am asking the congregation to turn to the hymn in the hymnal and listen to the first four stanzas and join us on the last. I told the choir I would probably write a descant for the last stanza. I am thinking of doing this this morning.

I am also learning an interesting little organ piece by another American composer, Virgil Thomson, for the postlude. It is the second of two movements in  “Church Organ Wedding Music” by him. Written in 1940 and revised in 1978, the first movement is called “To Come In” and the second “To Go Out.” I am learning “To Go Out.”  I figure that this music is rarely heard and I do like it.

I have just started subscribing to a bunch of podcasts online, including The Writer’s Almanac.  I love hearing who was born today ( David Mitchell,  Jack London both of whom I have read) and what else happened on this date (Anniversary of Haiti earthquake). And then a poem.

For years I used to read Poetry Magazine.  In 2003, it received a huge Lilly grant (200 million buckaroos) and is now free online with free podcasts and readings of poems. Cool beans.

I emailed this poem to my brother the priest this morning.

Have You Eaten of the Tree?

BY PAUL HOOVER

And the fourth river is the Euphrates

The first day was a long day
and the first night nearly eternal.
No thing existed, and only One was present
to perceive what wasn’t there.
No meaning as we know it;
difference was bound in the All.
On the first day, water,
on the second day, land,
on the third day, two kinds of light,
one of them night.
On the fourth day, laughter,
and darkness saw it was good.
But when God laughed,
a crack ran through creation.
On the fourth night, sorrow,
staring away from heaven,
torn in its ownness.
No evidence then of nothing,
but worlds upon worlds,
underwritten, overflowing:
the worlds of fear and of longing,
lacking in belief,
and the pitiful world of love,
forever granting its own wishes.
Out of dust, like golems,
God created man and woman,
and cast them into chance.
And man was subdued in those days.
All that could leap, leapt;
all that could weep, wept.
First of all places, Eden;
last of all places, Cleveland;
and a river flowed out of Eden,
inspiring in the dry land
a panic of growth and harvest season.
The newly formed creation
took from flesh its beast
and from each word its sentence.
And early loves and hatreds blew
from thistle to thorn.
Each thing that God created,
he placed before man
so that he may name it:
cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,
and for each thing that man made,
God provided the name:
andiron, Nietzsche, corporation.
All speak of pain
subtle in its clamor,
as when the child, dying,
sinks into its skin
as under public snow.
Heartrending, each termination;
God-shaken, each beginning.
At the dawn of smoke,
pungent as creation,
the long chaos rises over these trees.
For we opened our eyes in Eden,
with the taste of fruit on our lips.

(Genesis)

I like many lines in this poem. “All that could leap, leapt; and all that could weep, wept.” And then, “First of all places, Eden; Last of all places, Cleveland.” But the ending is very good. Another day in Paradise for sure … heh.

So Google Chrome Browser has a feature which will sync your bookmarks from one computer to another.

Unfortunately I have developed two sets of bookmarks for my two computers. Yesterday I spent hours trying to set up the bookmarks on my desktop browser so that I could sync them to my netbook. I felt like my brains were leaking out after about three hours.

I guess it was a good way to spend some time off.

I hit a glitch with the super secret Hope college web site for accessing their wireless on campus.

I couldn’t get the web site url to work properly in a copied bookmark. Sigh. It was right about at this time I decided that maybe I wouldn’t sync the two computers.

I also gave in and downloaded Juice, a free software that will subscribe to podcasts. I have resisted this so far.  Itunes is dominant in this area and I do not do Itunes. Every once in a while I will attempt to install it but fail.  So I used Juice to subscribe to several podcasts (This American Life, On the Media and several other NPR podcasts).

The New York Times seems to only allow Itunes as a subscription service to its podcasts.

It’s just as well since the NYT podcast page is bewilderingly disorganized presenting a list of podcasts that are organized not by date (!), but by some other mystifying way.

I just figured it out! I thought I would go over to the NYT podcast page and try to understand that organization so I could bitch about it.  It’s organized alphabetically, not by time, in this order:  Backstory, Bookreview, Front Page, Music Popcast, NYT Tech Talk, Science Times, The Caucus, The Ethicist, Times Talk, Weekend Business.  These are all idiosyncratic NYT’s podcast titles. Note the alphabetizing of titles under “The.”  Sigh. Some of these podcasts change weekly, some “occasionally.” I think this is haphazard and have mentioned it in emails to the NYT.

It amazes me that the old grey lady (the New York Times) is so backward in its tech.

If you click on a share on Facebook button on one of their articles, it pops you into a request to access all of your Facebook info and permission to email you about stuff. I don’t do this. I simple copy the url of the article when I share it.

The idea of “syncing” has never appealed that much to me.

Windows Media 11 is obnoxious about how it wants to sync stuff with my MP3 player. It only syncs playlists. Very helpful (sarcasm). And my MP3 player has no other way to make a playlist expect by downloading the entire list from Windows Media. No way to organize files into a play list on the player.

These methods of thinking designed into these tech things seem cumbersome to me, designed for ease of use by users who don’t quite get what they are doing.

I suppose this is just my age showing.

Thinking of MP3s and Podcasts as files.

Anyway, I have given up in both cases and do things the way they are designed.

But I still haven’t installed Itunes. Heh.

Music went well yesterday at church. I had a very small group of singers for the service: 1 sop, 3 altos, 2 tenors. The anthem I had chosen, a setting of the famous text, “At The Name of Jesus,” to the French carol tune, Noel Nouvelet,  worked well.  In the pregame, I took the choir through sequence hymn, “I come, the great Redeemer cries,” set to the lovely tune, This Endris Night, harmonized by Vaughan Williams. Afterwards I said now at least 6 people will know the tune the prelude is based on.

The prelude, a setting by George Oldroyd, went very well. I was very proud of the way I was able to execute the registration changes and create a smooth slow crescendo with this lovely, little modest English pastorale setting of “This Endris Night.”

The communion hymns were a praise chorus, “Jesus, name above all names,” and a neat little rendition of the African American Spiritual, “Take me to the water.”  These were fun. I also asked my one soprano to sing descants on the opening hymn, “Songs of Thankfulness and Praise,” the sequence hymn mentioned above and the closing hymn, “O Love, how deep, how broad, how high,” sung to the tune DEUS TUORUM MILITUM.  This was also kind of fun. The postlude also went well.

My boss was out of town. Attendance was down.

People seemed a bit disconnected from the prayer, but we did our damnedest and I thought it was pretty good. A couple of visiting musicians from Muskegon were cool to me afterwards, but that’s not that unusual. We often have musicians visiting and they sometimes don’t know what to make of the fuzzy old man in the back getting the music going.  Fuck the duck.

While I’m being all religious and shit, I might as well share the silly Music Notes  (Of which I am also pretty proud) I put in the bulletin yesterday:

Music Notes The story of the Baptism of Christ is a quintessential Epiphany story. Epiphany is defined accurately by Wikipedia as “… the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. …(from the ancient Greek , epiphaneia, “manifestation, striking appearance”)” In the readings assigned to Lectionary Year A, there is an emphasis on Christ, himself, as servant and the one who comes to fulfill the prophecy. Thus today’s hymns center on Jesus and Baptism. From today’s opening hymn,  “Songs of Thankfulness and praise,” to the closing, “O love, how deep, how broad, how high,” we give voice to words of manifestation of God in human form and the deep love of God that is revealed in Christ’s appearance in history. Our first communion hymn is one of the best known of praise choruses, “Jesus, name above all names.” Its centering on the name of Jesus reminds us of how God calls Jesus by name from the cloud in today’s gospel and how important this event was. It is taken from Voices Found. “Take me to the Water,” an African-American Spiritual taken from Lift Every Voice and Sing II, reminds us of Jesus’s insistence on being baptized by John.  “There was a time in south,” Gwendolin Sims Warren writes, “in the early days of slavery under the British law, when English planters thought baptism… made it necessary to free a slave—and so they forbade the ritual.” The radical nature of a slave singing this song in that situation emphasizes the liberation Christ brings to all in baptism. Today’s prelude is based on the sequence hymn, “I come,” the great Redeemer cries and the postlude is based on the melody from today’s Choral anthem, “At the Name of Jesus.” submitted by Steve Jenkins, Music Director

You can see I put a lot of effort into this stuff. But what the heck, I like doing it.

Came home and made Mexican Macaroni and Cheese for Eileen and me to eat. Studied what Charles Rosen has to say about the Haydn Piano trios I have recently taken an interest in (a lot!).

Another good day for Jupe.

[Warning: another long self obsessed blog post from jupe with 2 many dang wirds]

Lately I’ve been pondering my own ideas about how human relationships work. I think they are based on blood ties,  common interests, and/or history.  I know I have some pretty strong convictions about how I think relationships work. These convictions say a lot about who I have been and who I am now and at best are but a body part of the elephant in the room: the complexity of human interaction.

I think relationships work best with good feedback. I think this feedback is most effective in person and live. When I am talking to someone, I am very aware of the entire person, not just the words they are saying (or not saying). This kind of interaction is so intuitive it defies my own attempts at analyzing. But nevertheless I do think about this and also realize that my perception of who other people are include presence and history in a very deep way.

This presence (and often the history) can be lost in communication without emotion such as email or exchanges on the internet.  Writing email or communicating on the internet is so tricky these days because it often involves quick casual comments. These comments are framed by our emotion of the moment. These are so obvious to us, we often don’t realize how important they are to what we are saying.  What we mean would be much more obvious to the person we are addressing if they were in the same room with smelling us and tasting our moods and multiple quick reactions.

This extra information is often pointed to as the most of our communication to each other, much more than the words of our spoken or written language. That’s why written language continues to be such an art.

Good web designers of many ilks often say to themselves and others, when you communicate on the web: Talk like a person!

I take this to mean that if we avoid the false objectivity of academic parrot talk and lapse into our normal everyday speech we are much more likely to be understood.

Of course good writing for me involves clarity and simplicity.

This brings me to my next  idea about relationships and communication.  Even the meanings of words themselves change over time. And we as people constantly evolve and change sometimes into very different people from whom we have been. I think of my own father in the throes of his devolving personality due to the illness that killed him (Lewy Body Dementia).

I now believe that the normal metamorphosis of personality that inevitably occurs in each of us was sped up in my Dad’s disease. He memorably said at one point, “This is not who I am!”

I took this to mean that the personality that he had was much diminished from the complex series of people who he was over his life.  Sadly, in a way during his disease it was both who he was and who was not.

This changing personality makes communication tricky over time.

I am thinking of a friend I knew in college years ago.  We were musicians together and he taught me some guitar licks. We were casual friends. Now we are both on Facebook.  He is very political and unhappy about Obama and dang Democrats. I voted for Obama and continue to see him as doing a good job of leading at in impossible time  in our country.

So in this time of partisan stereotype, my old friend and I are on opposite sides of many moral and public questions.  Within the last few days I linked in on Facebook an article by Bob Herbert  called “Misery With Plenty of Company.” I understand its basic premise to be that the poor in our country while exploding as a demographic command no advocate in the political and governmental leadership.

The article is from the New York Times which is stereotyped as “liberal” as opposed to the Wall Street Journal which is stereotyped as “right wing.” It seems that these days are times of choosing one “side” or the other. I think it’s a lot more complicated (and interesting) than that. I have many “friends” on Facebook as well as in the “meat” world who I am pretty sure would not agree with my values. But I sort of like that. Exchanging ideas and opinions can be illuminating. I try to be civil when I engage occasionally in this ongoing exchange of ideas.

Anyway my friend “commented” in a way that made it obvious he disagreed with the premise I got from the article and said something about how easy it is to sell that vilifying the rich benefits the poor.

I “commented” back that I understood the article the way I describe above. But I also remember this man as having a sense of humor. When I was with him I experienced an interesting mixture of intelligence, sardonic humor and sadness. In my comment I tried to do a bit of humor in this way:

The point of the article is that there are no politicians who situating themselves as advocates of the poor. As far as vilifying rich people, I think of myself as rich, indeed, very lucky to live in the U.S. and have enough to eat and a place to sleep and an instrument to play and books to read and music to listen to. Okay the last few are silly.

Interestingly my friend respond with an emoticon that seemed to make a silly face.

I describe this at length to illustrate how the history of our relationship and talking like a person made our communication more human and less reactionary even though we disagree.

I can see I’m rambling on, but before I stop I want to be sure and talk about two more ideas.

First,  as a parent I have experienced the internalization of my personality in my children. This internalized parent (which I believe we all have to some extent) is a distinct person from myself. In fact I can remember the frustration of witnessing the conversation between my children’s internalized parent(me)  and themselves and not being able to get into the conversation, shut out by my own fixed personality as understood and captured in the heads of my kids.

This speaks to a couple of my ideas. First that how we perceive others is primary in our understanding of who they are. And secondly that we are all moving targets. And in each case, if we don’t have the continual feedback of physical presence we are even worse at understanding each other.

All this is a way of saying that I think that the internet is wonderful but it is only a supplement to actually being there.

Lastly, I think that trust is a basic element of relationship. I have difficulty trusting others. But I work at it. If you are my family, you are innocent (several times over) until proven guilty. If you are a colleague I assume you are competent, well informed and well meaning until I catch you out in a misrepresentation or lack of ability you claim to have.

I know that I put a lot of words into today’s blog.  But it’s just a portion of my understanding of this part of being a human.  Something that I keep thinking about and refining my understanding and actions around. Woo hoo!

I like this picture. According to the web site where I found it it’s Sawyer Glacier in the Tracy Arm of the Fords Terror Wilderness Area in Alaska. I used it as the background on my desktop just for a change.

Eileen’s Wii arrived yesterday. She was very happy. She spent the afternoon setting it up and bowling and playing baseball.  She intends to check out the fitness games.

I continued planning my upcoming few anthems.  I think I have a plan now for the next 7 weeks.  Today I will go over and pull anthems and make some on the photocopy machine (legally) and prepare for tomorrow.

Yesterday I went over to church and continued to rehearse a lovely piece composed by George Oldroyd. He is roughly the contemporary of the much more famous Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) and the piece I am playing sounds much like Vaughan Williams.  It’s based on the carol tune (and the sequence for the day tomorrow) called “This Endrys Night.”

It’s a gentle simple tune whose charms are brought out by a harmonization in the hymnal by R.V. Williams (also the first one above). I like the tune so much I wrote my own soprano descant for it for tomorrow.  Oldroyd indicates that his organ setting should start soft and build in intensity. He has subtitled it “A Christmas Paen.” A Paen is a “song of praise or joy.”

This is quite a feat to pull off on my small pipe organ at church. When one only has ten or so ranks of pipes (as opposed to the more normal fifty or so at the minimum) a gradual build-up takes some thought. I’m not complaining about it. I rather enjoy a challenge. First one has to plot out the registration or how you gradually add and subtract certain pipes. Then one learns how to remember what to turn on when as one is playing the piece. I think I can pull it off.

Unfortunately, it’s the prelude and I have to start very quiet and most of the subtlety of the gradual build-up will be lost in the sounds of people getting ready for church. No biggie. I get a charge out of thinking I could figure out how to do it on such a small instrument.

Eileen wanted to go out snowshoeing yesterday. Unfortunately there wasn’t that much snow. It was a good thing her wii came in the mail.

There is a bit more snow on the ground today.  Maybe she and I will go out after she gets home from work.

She has fancy new ones:

A few years ago she took a class and made some that look a lot like this:

I will be using those since she found them way too big for herself.  We will probably be hilarious to watch.

I spent most of yesterday working on choosing hymns and anthems for the upcoming six weeks between this Sunday and Ash Wednesday.  Managed to get all of the hymns chosen. The choir stuff is more problematic.  I now have only one soprano, 5 or 6 altos, 3 or 4 tenors, 2 or 3 basses. I put it that way, because people’s attendance continues to be irregular. I have accepted this and am trying to come up with creative solutions.

At the same time my professional integrity insists that I at least consider trying to elevate the tone both by choosing music that is interesting and well-written, but also explicates or relates to the readings of the service.

This is a tall order. But I did find some solutions. I still have about three anthems left to come up with.  I also have to strategize how quickly the choir will be able to pick something up. I have sketched in a little simplified version of a Handel Chandos Anthem (no. 4) for a week from Sunday. This is probably not enough time to learn even an easy two part anthem that is not designed specifically for quick learning. But the anthem is pretty general (The text is “O Worship the Lord” from Psalm 96), so I can probably schedule it later since it is a good piece of music and fits my situation (2 part women and men being feasible).

(When searching for a picture to go with the previous paragraph I ran across a site that sold me a copy of the entire original version picture above for $1.86 (Everynote.com). I had already searched online to try and find more information on this piece in the usual free sites.  Cool beans. I’m printing out a copy in order to study the version my choir will do. I love the internets!

Yesterday afternoon I brought a Haydn trio (Hoboken XV:1 in G Minor).  I have loved Haydn’s music for many years.  I have played several times through his piano sonatas and took an entire class on him from the Haydn expert, Ethan Haimo, at Notre Dame which involved close intelligent scrutiny of many of his works.

I was happily surprised to find many of his trios available as sheet music free online (link to page) and equally happy that the one I chose was such a little masterpiece.  My fellow musicians seemed to also get into it. A good time (first rehearsal after Xmas) to read some new music.

Haydn is a bit easier (not easy but a bit easier) than Mozart and Mozart is a bit easier than Mendelssohn. If I had it to do over again I would have suggested Hadyn before the other two. The piano trios of Mozart and Mendelssohn are wonderful but quite a bit of work of me.

I’ll end with some links I’ve been perusing:

First a couple I picked up off my Twitter Feed and have bookmarked to read:

Utne Reader plugged its article on the relationship of music to increased dopamine levels and decreased depression: “Ode to Joy”

Harold Reingold recommended Cathy Davison’s response to the NYT’s article on IPads in schools. Found on the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboration web site, she remarks: “…[I]f you change the technology but not the method of learning, then you are throwing bad money after bad practice.

The rest of these links I have mostly read through and bookmarked for future reference:

‘The Nutcracker’ Chronicles: Listening to the Score – NYTimes.com

‘Nutcracker’ Questions With Many Answers – NYTimes.com

After Ravages of Time and War, Triage to Save Babylon – NYTimes.com

How the Left Is Left Out – Ralph Nader’s View – NYTimes.com

A Clear and Present Danger to Free Speech – NYTimes.com

The Achievement Test – NYTimes.com “The size of government doesn’t tell you what you need to know; the social and moral content of government action does”

States Seek Laws to Curb Power of Unions – NYTimes.com

How to Listen to Minimalism | Chamber Musician Today

That’s Not Twain – NYTimes.com

Charles Byrne, Irish Giant, Had Rare Gene Mutation – NYTimes.com Genes, not pituitary

It was this picture that grabbed Eileen’s attention in a new book at the library. This man is Andrew Wyeth the artist.

The book is Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman.

It is a collection of photographs of people over 65 and some of their views on life.

Earlier this same day, I read and then “shared” on Facebook a wonderful homily by the Dalai Lama called “Countering Stress and Depression.”

More wisdom:

Taking a realistic view and cultivating a proper motivation can also shield you against feelings of fear and anxiety. If you develop a pure and sincere motivation, if you are motivated by a wish to help on the basis of kindness, compassion, and respect, then you can carry on any kind of work, in any field, and function more effectively with less fear or worry, not being afraid of what others think or whether you ultimately will be successful in reaching your goal. Even if you fail to achieve your goal, you can feel good about having made the effort.

The Dalai Lama’s words can sound a bit aphoristic, his life, his faith and his clarity are one’s I find inspiring and helpful.

When I sat down last night to look at the book Eileen brought home, at first I thought it was primarily a collections of photographs of the faces of famous old people.

I opened the book and found that there was quite a bit of prose with the first photograph.

So I began reading it. At one point I was so impressed with the following paragraph that I looked around for a sticky to mark it for future reference.

Regarding Chinua Achebe’s first attempt at writing fiction:

“The first attempt I made what when I was a student at the University College of Ibadan, I was told by my teachers from England, ‘This is a good piece of work, but it lacks form.’ And so I said, ‘Okay, what’s form? Can you tell me what form is?’ And the lecturer said, ‘All right, we’ll talk about it next week, I’m going to play tennis right now.’ So we didn’t talk about it next week, we didn’t talk about it next month. Long afterwards she came to me and said, ‘You know, I looked at your story and I think it’s all right.’ So I never learned what form was. Actually she had nothing much to teach me, it was a kind of instruction to me that this is something you have to do on your own. Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am and what I need, these are things I have to find out myself.”

I loved this paragraph. I added bold above so you could see what sentence grabbed me. At first I thought it might be better phrased for me this way: “Only I can teach myself who I am.” Then I decided that Achebe’s way was pithier and also maybe more clear.

I turned the page and here’s what I saw.

I started chuckling.

One last little bit before I close from Richard Adams (Yes, he’s the author of Watership Down and yes, the book is alphabetical order).

“There was a clergyman who was having a bit of a walk around in the evening and he came to a nice field and there was an old chap who was obviously a gardener, leaning on a gate smoking his pipe. The vicar knew him all right, he was one of his parishioners. Name was Giles. And the vicar looked down at the field and said, ‘Ah, Giles, you and the Lord have made a wonderful difference here.’ ‘Ah,’ said the chap, ‘and you should have seen it when the Lord had it to himself.’ “