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Today is supposedly the first day of my vacation. I have a ton of stuff to do. Eileen used the weekend to prep because she has to work today. I need to pack and run some errands. I woke up exhausted. I think this means this is a vacation I need.
The first thing we are going to do is attend a funeral in South Bend tomorrow morning. Eileen and I sat down and made motel reservations yesterday. That was a relief. Now I have a good idea where we are going.
We will be watching our pennies but spending enough to relax. The motel we booked for Tues and Wed is quite nice and has all the amenities we were looking for (indoor pool, fitness center, in room wi fi).
Last night we watched Derek Jarman’s movie, Caravaggio. Wow. What a flick. I thought it was excellent. I especially liked the lighting which aped the visual style of the painter and the intentional cool anachronistic stuff like the clothes, and little techie things like calculators and typewriters. Very cool.
Went to bed and woke up a bit depressed. I was hoping for a check in the mail for the recent Valentine’s day gig (2 weeks ago). Eileen cautioned me that I should contact them since I haven’t heard from them. So I emailed someone last night. Received a response that a) yes I am getting paid; b) no one seems to have put in for a check for me yet. I don’t even know the amount they are going to pay me. Knowing the local scene it could be as little as $30.00. Or I could even have my signals crossed and have once again played a freebie. I know. I know. It’s my own responsibility.
At any rate, Eileen and I took Alexander Technique lessons yesterday. I am convinced this is a way of bodily movement that could improve quality of life.(see link # 10 below) The trouble is it really needs to be pursued with some regularity. Yesterday was my second lesson. I want Eileen to have another as well. At $45-$55 dollars a lesson (the prices vary due to which institution is hosting our teacher and also he gave Eileen $5 off since I asked if he did family discounts), it’s out of our price range for weekly lessons.
We had a lovely meal at Bombay Cuisine in East Town Grand Rapids.
I am in sore need of some time off. I haven’t had a Sunday off since way before Xmas. I more obsessed than ever with my work. Eileen consented to helping me legally photocopy and assemble 8 anthems yesterday after we got back from Grand Rapids. I was down anyway so I thought I wouldn’t put the work off for another day. Thank you, Eileen.
I woke up thinking in the middle of the night that I should use this upcoming vacation as a composing/study vacation. I am planning to haul my silly electric piano around with us. We will begin by spending the night near South Bend Indiana so that we can attend Gail Walton’s funeral on Tuesday morning. [link to my Feb 25th post about her death].After that we’ll probably hole up in a motel near Ann Arbor for a couple of days. It would be a good time for me to do some study on fugal writing as well as general composing.
I’m pretty sure I need to work on this. I can remember my counterpoint teacher Dr. Parks teasing me that I never really learned how to write a good fugue. Education. It just keeps on giving.
Anyway, I’m probably just in a foul mood.
"foul mood" .... get it?
I woke up and found several articles online that look good. Haven’t read a one of these yet. But here they are for what it’s worth:
1.”Weaponizing Mozart: How Britain is Using Music as a Form of Social Control” by Brendan O’Neill [link to reason.com article]
2. “It’s money that matters: A new book says economic inequality is the social division we should be worrying about” by Jenna Russell [link to boston.com article]
4. “Ten rules for writing fiction” by many writers including Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle & Jonathan Franzen [link to guardian.co.uk article]
5. Andrew Sullivan’s Chart of the Day:
Click on chart to go to link
realitychex.com or CW (Constant Weader) response:
click on this chart to go to realitychex.com
“CW: Now, look at the two bars I colored green: about 35% of conservatives want to decrease or eliminate “welfare,” but only about 10% want to cut “aid to the poor.” What’s the difference between “welfare” & “aid to the poor”? Sullivan: “Welfare means aid to the black poor, surely? And aid to the poor means white, right?”
So I’m sitting at the Grand Rapids Marywood Dominican Center. They have renovated this place since I was here, but you can still see a lot of the old building pictured above. Eileen is taking her first Alexander Technique lesson and I’m very happy that they have an unsecured wi fi connection here. Yes.
I got up early this morning and spent several hours putting a Brahms choral piece into finale.
Whenever I adapt a piece of music, I have a tendency to enter it first entirely in its original form. Which is what took up so much of my time this morning.
So after I had done that, I began to think about how to adapt it for mixed voices (SATB). This actually didn’t take very long once I had the basic piece inputted.
Yesterday I had a conference with my priest in which I suggested that I would choose two anthems for every service in Holy Week: one easy one to use with combined Adults and Youth and one a bit harder for just the Chamber Choir. She readily agreed to this.
After the conference I spent some time going through music that would fit the various services. Here’s what I came up with. (Fascinating, I know)
Palm Sunday
Jenkins Hosanna with hand chimes
Ah Holy Jesus arr. by Barbara Wallace – Chamber & Youth choirs combinedIn Manus Tuas by John Shepherd – Chamber Choir
4/1/10 Maundy Thurs –
Holy Thursday
V 78 Lord God, revealed in gifts of bread and wine – Chamber & Youth choirs combined
Ubi Caritas by Durufle – Chamber Choir possible with some Youth Choir singers
4/2/10 Good Friday
Crown of Thorns, Crown of Glory arr. by Mark Schweitzer -Chamber & Youth choirs combined
Adoramus Te by Brahms -Chamber Choir
4/4/10 Easter Both services:
Alleluia, Christ is Risen arr. by James Kirby – Chamber & Youth choirs combined
Christ is now risen again by Alan J. Wilson – Chamber Choir
So that’s what I’ve decided. The last anthem seems to be out of print. Sheesh. I will try to get legal copies. I think maybe it was published in the UK in the 70s. Probably not available in the U.S.
Receive sad news this morning. My teacher, Craig Cramer, has been watching his wife Gail Walton struggle with a debilitating bone marrow disease (a myelodysplastic syndrome). After a long struggle, she died yesterday. Craig and Gail were both music teachers at Notre Dame U. They both were immeasurably helpful to me when I was there. Since graduating in ’87 I have had several contacts with Craig. Recently I purchased his old copy of the complete Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. They sit proudly on my piano.
My organ prof, Craig Cramer, at Notre Dame
The last time I saw Craig, Eileen and I just happened to run into him in the international Airport in Newark (not Detroit, thank you, Eileen for this correction) last May. Craig was on his way to Germany and Eileen and I were on our way to England. It was a pleasant coincidence and we had a nice chat. Gail would be diagnosed in the following July, but Craig didn’t begin sharing their struggle via email until October of last year.
He emailed updates to those of us who knew them on Gail’s brave struggle. The emails became more and more desperate and sad. Watching someone you love die is a very difficult and painful thing. I recently did this with my own father. Even so, I can’t imagine what Craig and Gail and their family have been through.
This is the third fine musician I have known to die within the last week.
Church musician composer Richard Proulx who died last week
Yesterday I managed to find an obituary for Richard Proulx in the Chicago Tribune. [link] and a press release from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) about the recent death of Richard Hillert.
Richard Hillert who recently died. Click on the pic for a link to his obit.
I have struggled with church music as a field due to my own questions about it can play out in the honestly in the lives of communities. Despite that, these people were all people who gave of themselves to music and specifically church music. Gail was an incredible performer. As is Craig. Hillert and Proulx were both composers whose craft was one that I admired a great deal. Hillert even gave me some compositional advice when a mutual acquaintance dragged me to his office for some shop talk.
I continue to believe that being alive is its own goal and reward. Life is a gift we are mysteriously given. These people who have died recently all had full lives. I knew Proulx the least, but of the other two I could reasonably say they lived and loved and made wonderful music. Not bad, really.
Yesterday at my Mom’s pain clinic, I spotted a portly young woman reading Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange.
I was intrigued. Unfortunately I could figure out no appropriate way to strike up a conversation with someone obviously occupied. Although she did glance up occasionally at the incessant blaring parade of infomercials on the inevitable TV screen.
One reason I was so intrigued is that the novel is so completely different than the movie. The novel is primarily about words and ideas. The movie remains in my head as a series of outrageous violent scenes accompanied by (then Walter, now Wendy) Carlos’s electronic renditions of Beethoven.
In the book, Burgess creates a slang for his brutal gang of stylishly dressed louts (modeled on a short-lived real group of boys in the U.K. called the “Teddies” who dressed in Edwardian garb and were also violent street louts).
The Brit Teddy Boy gang movement in the 50s which Burgess had in mind in Clockwork Orange
The slang was a mixture of Russian and English. I remember a few of the coinages off hand including molaka (sp?) with knives was milk spiced with vodka…. the old in-out was rape or sex…. (“no time for the old in-out now, luv” quips Alex as he responds in a quick pictorial association test to a picture of a man on a ladder outside a window with a woman watching)
The ideas come later in the book and I could see that the reader in the pain clinic was only about a fourth of the way through the slim volume. So she probably wasn’t being exposed to the idea of the futility and utter inhumanness of a mechanical piece of fruit (the orange) standing in for reducing people to a shallow mechanical understanding of psychology and behavior.
Burgess turns this common place argument on its head by making his hero the repugnant Alex with the one redeemable attribute of loving Beethoven’s music (“lovely Beethoven”). Which of course the pavlovian doctors use as a secondary reinforcement to the primary reinforcement of conditioning him against his anti-social violence.
Yikes. I just realized that as I write I remember the movie visuals more vividly than the book.
Such is my contemporary dilemma. Image triumphs over word in my lizard brain.
Anyway, I was wondering what in the world the young reader was making of the syntactical weirdness of this particular bit of Burgess prose, when the health worker once again came in the room and could not believe I was my Mother’s ride much less son.
I linked in a great article yesterday by Meaghan Morris on Facebook called Grizzling about Facebook [link]. I so admired this author’s thinking and writing that I checked her biblio and interlibrary loaned a book of hers called “Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture.”
As I scrolled further into her list of publications I discovered at the bottom (the oldest) the book, “The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. Hmmm. I vaguely recognized it. A quick check of the library and lo and behold it was sitting there on the shelf. Cool beans.
Unfortunately the book reviewed in the link The Music Instinct” by Philip Ball [link]. sounds good but doesn’t seem to be available in the U.S. either in the library on on Amazon. I notice that his U.S. releases are sort of old so maybe eventually this will be released. It doesn’t look like a mind shattering book.
Patterned on the ever present Steven Pinker’s title, “The Language Instinct,” it seemed to be a generalists treatment of the modern discussion of what music is for, especially in regards to evolutionary understandings of personality and neurology. Oh well. I sometimes get more out of the generalist books than books from my field.
I plowed further into the books on my reading pile last night including:
Them by Francine Du Plessix Gray
Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson
And
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
A reader in a pain clinic is a good metaphor for escape reading, I guess. Heh.
Smokey, my friend, you are entering a world of pain.
I end with this:
Don’t you think that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran
Yesterday I read this moving and disturbing meditation by someone suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease): “Night” by Tony Judt
This one I actually read in the “meat” world as William Gibson calls it (the non-cyber world). It does put one in a frame of mind about how people handle life crises.
I keep running into people who are in the middle of these things. No one I am related to, I hasten to add. But people dealing with death and impending death. Tough stuff. Just yesterday a young person I know seemed especially glum. “What’s the matter? Weather getting you down?” “My Grandpa died this weekend. He was old and it was time for him to go, but it’s still hard.” I bumbled through condolences. I don’t think it matters much what you say to people grieving, just that you are there with them.
This morning I got up and happened upon two articles about Facebook. I’m still reading the second of these “Grizzling about Facebook” [link]. I was surprised that it seemed so superior to the first one from New York Review of Books. The author is Meaghan Morris. According to her online bio she is somehow simultaneously Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.
She is brilliant I think. Here’s a sample that plunged me into thought:
“…]J]ournalists often draw on their rich professional reserves of reductively metonymic realism (‘setting the scene’, the ‘character sketch’) to cast social network users as types whose ways of acting are symptomatic or productive of diverse social ills: alongside terrorists and sexual predators there are always students uploading their mobile pics of boorishly drunken parties, ‘stupid girls’ sharing every detail of their vapid daily routines, and workers who boast about bludging but forget that they’ve friended their boss. As in folklore, each of these figures is sustained by a dense field of concrete examples both stellar (Hugh Grant and Bono for Facebook party uploads, MySpace’s Paris Hilton or Twitter’s Ashton Kutcher for cosmic triviality) and ‘it-could-be-you’ mundane (Kyle Doyle’s ‘SICKIE WOO’ Facebook status update).Simultaneously grounded in and abstracted from the real history of on-line culture, such figures ‘stick’ in media memory, powerfully eliciting recognition (the party animal, the princess, the slack worker) while drawing attention away from a myriad other practices thriving on the sites. Stereotypes are forms of apprehension rather than bad representations, and their force is to mobilize familiar knowledge to explain and absorb unfamiliar experience (Morris, Identity 143-44).
I had to look up both “bludging” and “metonymic.”
The former means lying about with no particular purpose and seems to to be an Australian elocution. The latter means a reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes. (from meta , “change” and onoma, “name”). I do like the phrase: “reductively metonymic realism.”
And the idea that stereotype is rooted in a mild form of fear is helpful to me, since I am often on the receiving end of such reduction.
One colleague years ago said that people had trouble with me because I am hard to typecast, because I don’t fit easily into a mold. This was a helpful thing to hear.
So even as people frown in my direction or look at me uncertainly as they sometimes do here in holy old Holland, I try to remain as cheerful and friendly as possible.
The other Facebook article was “In the World of Facebook” [link] by Charles Peterson in the upcoming New York Review of Books. I read that one online in its entirety.
Here’s a sample from this article:
“What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way…”
This article has some history of Facebook which was informative to me.
A third article I have bookmarked to read is called “The Music Instinct” by Philip Ball [link]. I found it on one of my favorite online resources Arts & Letters Daily [link] where they aroused my curiosity by saying “Is music “cheesecake for the mind,” as Steven Pinker put it? Well, if you can show that Homo sapiens has a deep emotional need for cheesecake..”
This leads me into the boring music stuff in today’s post. Yesterday I had a revelation about French Baroque music. Specifically about playing unequal notes (notes inégales) and the tempo of suite movements called Allemande (which is French for German).
I was rereading Francois Couperin’s L’Art de Toucher de Clavecin in an attempt to understand what he had marked an Allemande to be played quickly.
I have understood the Allemande suite movement as generally a slow movement. My deceased teacher, Ray Ferguson, taught me to play Francois’s Uncle Louie (Couperin) and other French Baroque organ music as well as Francois Couperin’s music and taught me when to do inegale and when not to. Intrigueingly the Allemande I was looking at was not only marked to be played quickly but without inegale.
I noticed that in his writing he says that he indicates unequal playing with slurs. Then I noticed pieces that I have performed in which there are slurs just in a few places. I think this may mean that the rest of the piece should be performed in equal notes. This really changed a bunch of his music and I spent the day happily plunking away at pieces whose meaning was slightly different and became charmed all over again by Francois Couperin’s lovely keyboard music.
Today is the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth. This photograph gives an impression that he was a bit of serious guy. And of course he was deeply connected to his work. But as for me, I think of Chopin and I think of beauty and playfulness.
I have found many of his piano works challenging as a pianist. But at the same time I am drawn not to the technical challenge (Liszt is not my cup of tea and that is what he seems to primarily offer), but to the charm of the musical thoughts.
Edgar Degas, Dancer Adjusting Her Shoe
Yesterday I spent a bit of time in the presence of beauty at church. The choir again sang the lovely “O Lord increase my faith” by Orlando Gibbons. Interestingly this edition was edited by Richard Proulx who died this week.
Van Eyck, Giovanni Arnolfini and the Bride
After church in the rehearsal, there was moment I experienced profound beauty as I introduced the choir to Calvin Hampton’s tune for the words “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy.” Hampton’s melancholy tune transforms the words of this hymn from a sentimental poem to a wistful meditation.
Jonathan B. Hall has this illustration on his web site on the page describing his bio of Hampton. I don't know what this picture is exactly, but it does capture something about the music of the tune I am talking about. Again click on the pic to go to Hall's website for further info.
Earlier as I walked to church, the sound of birds in the trees made me smile. I have been reading Roger Scruton’s book, “Beauty.” He insists that there is no aesthetic understanding (or at least intention) in bird song. Even as I read Scruton’s words I wondered what Messiaen would have said (WWMD What Would Messaien Do) since he said that birds were the best musicians on the planet. Hearing the birds yesterday I found Scruton’s intelligent prose paling in the sound of the beauty of birdsong in the morning.
Later I spent time at the piano with Joplin and Bartok again. They are an odd pair but they seem to be working for me.
Scott Joplin
I am especially taken with Joplin’s beautiful rag called “Solace.” The subtitle of this piece is “A Mexican Serenade.” Joplin cleverly combines the haunting sound of a gentle rag (he seemed to think people tended to play his music too fast) with the suggestion of a tango rhythm in the left hand.
This is especially interesting because the Tango rage is usually dated several years after Joplin published this piece. Brahms also predated the tango with the second theme of the first movement of his fourth symphony.
Johannes Brahms
I finished up yesterday with a Brahms Hungarian dance for piano. It’s a long way from Bartok’s Hungary to Brahms’ Hungary. Brahm’s music is largely fabricated out of his own German/Viennese sensibility of the exotic. I still find it lovely and fun to play. I just think it’s folk music roots are not as deep as it’s composer or maybe some of it’s listeners might think.
No big deal. Bartok transformed his understanding of musical material in his environment as did Joplin. That’s some of what attracts me.
Bela Bartok
As I sit in my kitchen thinking about the darkness of the morning outside, I hear my neighbors start their car. I wonder how removed my ideas and experience of beauty is from other people. A week ago Sunday I led a performance of music at my recital. The people in the room seemed to respond strongly to the beauty and charm of the music we presented. That I know was real.
That’s why I keep being drawn to music that is performed live. The experience of performing music live and hearing it live is for me what keeps the beauty going. There is something about the energy that combines a spontaneity
and openness in both listener and performer.
I was reading in Gide’s “Notes on Chopin” this morning. He said this:
“We are told that when he was at the piano Chopin always looked as if he were improvising; that is, discovering his thought little by little.”
It is this “discovery” or surprise that is something I experience over and over in beauty.
“Politicians often get into trouble when they’re trying to sound more furious than they feel. And Pawlenty [Governor of Minnesota] told the conservatives they should try to be more like … Tiger Woods’s wife.“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country,” he urged.The overall strangeness of this thought aside, consider the timing. An angry man had just smashed his airplane into an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex., killing one federal employee, injuring others and breaking quite a few windows. Does this seem like the very best time to be encouraging people to assault government property? Pawlenty’s defenders will undoubtedly say that he did not want his listeners to literally grab a golf club and hit something. But it is my experience that many Americans do not totally understand the concept of a metaphor” Taken from Gail Collins article, “The Wages of Rages” in Friday’s NYT [link]
See the article for more examples of over the top rage. Collins is talking about Republicans but hate does not limit itself to any one group of people in our country.
I often wonder what my dead guru, Ed Friedmann, the family systems psychologist, would make of the current climate in the U.S.
When he was alive, he maintained that the U.S. society was “stuck” in a climate of free floating anxiety. He traced this to around the time JFK was assassinated.
I think we might be beyond “stuckness.” I feel like U.S. society is shifting. The currency of so much of what passes for rhetoric or even news is fear and anger. That is when the noise of the public voices of mind deadening banal entertainment and superficiality even bother to turn themselves to current events. Unfortunately I can even see this in myself. But that is the nature of this kind of thing. We seek the other to despise and find that he is us. There’s an article in yesterday’s NYT that says the anthrax killer from 2008 was indeed one of us. Bruce Ivins, an Army bio-defense expert. [link]
I am reminded of the old Twilight Zone episode where a neighborhood is transformed into a raging killing mob searching for evidence of recently landed aliens. Did you ever see that one?
I am old enough to remember the visceral racial hatred of the sixties. I frightened my parents as a child when I insisted on drinking at the “colored” water fountain in a public spot.
Later my Dad told me that if he had decided to join the civil rights bus rides that he would not have been welcome in the homes of people in the churches he served. White people, obviously. As a young man, I read Hanna Arendt’s book: “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A study in the banality of evil.”
Click on this pic for an explanation of Arendt's idea of "banality of evil."
It has been years since I looked at this book. But the idea I remember from it is that Eichmann (who was a bureaucrat responsible for organizing many many systematic murders of people) was not a unique human being. He was no monster. He was in fact sort of boring. He was all too much like any other person. But somehow he had slipped into facilitating one of the horrors of the 20th century. Recently my little town of Holland Michigan was highlighted by national news as the #2 happiest place in the country to live.
I reacted badly to these news reports until I had a bit more information about what they were reporting on. Holland is like any other town. It has good points and bad points. One of its bad points is the local hypocrisy about many issues. I think that’s why I was stung by this national news report. The study it was based on does not seem to be as naive. It was attempting to measure a sense of well being. Okay. Much better. But of course distorted in the many reported stories through out the United States to mean “happiness.” My understanding of the underside of human nature is that the best place to look for this is in the mirror.
I think that might be part of what I got out of reading William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies. Although this book can be read as a societal struggle in the face of chaos, I still think hard about casting stones about other people’s hatred without examining my own prejudices and misunderstandings. This stance sometimes requires me to be mute in the face of confused accusations in order not to do what is being done to me: namely to react in anger and misreading of other people. I persist in trying to embrace Martin Buber’s ideas of moving from seeing people as objects (I-it) to seeing the other as valuable and worth loving (I-Thou). The echo chamber of ignorance and misunderstanding that I watch in the USA right now drowns out so much of our better natures. This echo chamber ignores the story of our history. It’s as though Father Coughlin never stoked the flames of hatred from his radio show in Detroit or that we as a nation developed a taste for killing called lynching that was active right up until the early 1980s.
Charles Coughlin whose anti-semitic ravings stoked the fear around WWII
Like the example of the character of the young boy Charles in Madeline L’Engle’s children’s books, I feel like the simple ways we handle ourselves are cosmically important.
Funny that this is coupled in me with a “loss of religion.” That’s me in the corner. Like the song says:
That’s me in the spotlight, I’m
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
Today seems to be a Beethoven day. Coffee and playing through the Sonata 18 in Eb brought me a bit closer to morning sanity.
Right now I’m listening to Glenn Gould’s wonderfully eccentric rendition of the F minor Sonata.
Glenn Gould
I always get a kick out of the trio of the minuet. It reminds me of the melody of the old beer commercial: “From one beer lover to another…”
On Fridays I usually do bills, both Eileen’s and mine and those of my mother.
My Mom is second from the left.
One little project I have for this morning is to apply online for a copy of my Mom and Dad’s marriage certificate. I need this in order to somehow restart part of my Dad’s pension with Hartford Insurance for Mom. They wrote me back in October and requested a bunch of information. I have put this off too long. Today’s the day to get the marriage certificate. I think with that I will have everything I need. I just hope they haven’t imposed some sort of deadline and I have mess up my my Mom’s income.
A more recent pic of my beautiful Mom. That's me on the right. The old guy.
She hasn’t been feeling all that great, but I just got off the phone with her and I’m going to get her out of the apartment for lunch and some shopping, so that’s good.
I was reading Sid Fleischman’s “Escape! The Story of The Great Houdini” last night. The reading level on it was ages 9-12, so I was surprised at some of the words he used like “menage” and some others. I suppose young people can work a dictionary if they happen not to know some of the words. Or even use the “define: ” search in Google, which is something I sometimes do.
Houdini was quite a character.
I have a memory of reading a biography of him before. I was amused by many of the photographs Fleischman includes in his biography.
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began—
I loved my friend.
Langston Hughes
This poem is in the following book.
I sat down last night and read the entire thing. Beautiful.
I liked the poem above.
It reminded me of friends who have cut themselves off from me. This has happened a few times. I have angered people and they have walked out of my house and my life. This poem captures that for me.
Augusta Baker says that when she read Hughes’ poems to children at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library their favorites were these two:
Mother to Son
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And rechin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps ‘Cause you finds it kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
Youth
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday
A night-gone thing,
A sun-down name.
And dawn-today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
I avoid the whole dialect thing when possible these days. But on the other hand I have immense respect for Hughes’ work. I have read him for years. And I think his use of dialect is fine, of course.
I was interested that the text I set for my composer group was also part of the opening collect (prayer) for Ash Wednesday’s service last night:
“Lord, you hate nothing you have made”
The full text assigned was “Lord, you are merciful to all and hate nothing you have created. You overlook the sins of men to bring them to repentance. You are the Lord our God.” Wisdom 11:24-25, 27
I recall a friend of mine (a gay person firmly if gently in the closet) mentioning this was one of her favorite Bible verses.
I’m thinking I might use the piece I wrote for my group with my own choir during Lent. I don’t have all the anthems chosen yet and it might be fun. If only I can figure out where it fits in.
I have reading and thinking about the Alexander Technique. I like the way doing this is mostly not doing. The teacher never said “relax” to me. I avoid saying this to myself. Instead, one tries to gently inhibit voluntary contraction of muscles that lead to tension.
In fact, one thing about this is to become in tune with involuntary muscular action and inhibiting voluntary muscle action that changes the whole alignment of the skeleton.
“It turns out the effort is not in feeling our bodies but in not feeling them.”
Barabara Conable, “How to Learn the Alexander Technique”
What this means to me is the notion of not directing your body to do stuff. More become aware of your body in a kinesthetic (or spatial awareness) way.
Conable goes into quite some depth about “mapping” one’s body. She points out that “When there is a conflict between the map and the reality, the map will always win in movement.” She describes the neck and its muscles with detail. She suggests touching your own neck and putting up pictures of how the neck actually is. When you pass a picture you can remind yourself: “This is a neck.”
Charming.
One exercise she suggests is that you draw your body.
Then compare it to what you learn about your actual body. My drawing didn’t even a real neck. Ahem. Covered over by my beard.
Finally, Holland Michigan was recently mentioned as one of the “Happiest Places in the U.S.” [link to the ABC story]
I think this is not true. I find this place a cesspool of prejudice, ignorance and intolerance. I guess the people in charge are pretty happy, though. Maybe we’re just a bunch of singing munchkins and I missed my invites to the party.
I purchased my first and probably my last Kindle book yesterday. I was exciting when I downloaded my Kindle for PC software recently, thinking it would give me access to Kindle books.
The way I sometimes do things is borrow a book from the library (or more likely interlibrary loan it) read in it a bit and then purchase it.
That’s what happened with Roger Scruton’s interesting little book, “Beauty.”
Since it is a philosophical work of sorts, I had little stickies in it marking passages and containing notes.
I had renewed the library’s copy as much as possible and thought that now would be a good time to buy a Kindle book copy as it was the cheapest way to purchase a copy (including used) at 9.99 (and no S & H since it pops right down to my laptop from the internets).
So I bought it as a Kindle book from Amazon.
Last night I settled in to copy my bookmarks and notes from my stickies when I discovered that the tab marked “Notes and Marks” on the right side bar is only for notes you make with your Kindle reader machine. In the PC version, there is no way to highlight or enter notes.
Frustrated, just for kicks, I checked around to see if there was any way to purchase a copy online that would allow me to do this.
The Barnes and Noble PC reader software apparently allows notes and highlights. But Barnes and Noble did not offer an ebook version of the text.
Ebooks had the text. It could be read by Adobe’s digital reader which is actually quite nice and beats the shit out of Kindle with it’s lovely print and ability to reproduce illustrations nicely.
The Adobe Digital Reader interface which is quite nice. Unfortunately the version of the book, "Beauty," compatible with this reader costs as much as the list price of the hardcover: $19.95.
However, the cost of the ebook was $19.95. Which is the list price of the hard copy. Amazon at least will sell you a hard copy for 14.36 and also links into copies for as cheap as 12.37. Good grief.
I found this article from last year (“Kindle for PC: A Rough draft at best by Harry McCracken – link) which details these very weaknesses of Kindle for PC software. Ah well. This seems to be more and more usual. As a consumer I am blocked and frustrated in ease of use. The result is that people who are supposedly trying to make money selling me stuff are convincing me I don’t need their product. Just an observation. If Kindle updates its software of course I will reconsider.
An odd thing happened to me yesterday with the Alexander Technique stuff.
"Curiouser and curiouser..."
When Eileen left for work, I was quite upset. Frustrations with people at church and other stuff. Eileen was sympathetic but I was in a typical Jupe tizzy.
I proceeded to put myself into the position my AT teacher taught me.
This is very interesting because I am not doing “relaxation” as I do this. I am at most noticing where my body is, how my back and hips touch the ground, and how my head is positioned. I did still my mind a bit but nothing very deep. I only paid attention to how long I was doing this. I had decided ten minutes of this was about right.
At the end of ten minutes of this (my teacher insisted that it is an activity and I think he is right), I noticed another thing. I was not as upset. It might seem obvious that physical stillness can engender emotional calm, but for me it was surprising.
I popped up and did my treadmilling. While treadmilling I read in Barbara Conable’s book, “How To Learn the Alexander Technique.”
I was bemused to read in the section entitled “Kinesthesia is Only One Element in Body Awareness” that she had a subheading for “Emotion” which begins
“Emotion, whatever else it is, is a sensation. When a wave of fear or anger or joy sweeps over us we experience it at least to some degree as a wave of sensation. Students differ in their interpretation of that sensation, especially in the relationship they believe it has to their tensing. Some say that tensing is an expression of their emotion, others that it is a resistance to it.”
Wow. This was what I had just experienced. A physical cessation of tension led me to a change in emotional feeling. I had begun the day with a bit of depression in me. My frustration had increased the intensity of my feelings. After doing the AT positioning with very little conscious mental direction about muscular tension or mental concentration, I had lost much of the emotional intensity. The depression remained but more as a background than a foreground experience. And only slightly there. As it is even now as I write.
Later Eileen asked me questions about this and Alexander Technique. I showed her the position (which is so simple as to be almost embarrassing). I read her a couple of passages in the Conable book.
She decided to check out the book that Conable recommends for people with Back Pain by another AT teacher and physical therapist: “Back Trouble” by Deborah Caplan.
This morning we agreed that the next time I get an opportunity to take a lesson from my teacher, I would try to schedule her a session as well.
At 55 bucks a pop, we can’t afford more than a couple of these. But still I think I would benefit from one more session before summer. And would like to see Eileen get in a couple.
As promised here are my impressions of my first Alexander Technique lesson.
My first impression of my teacher was that he held his upper body oddly.
Involuntarily I looked at him with the eye of a choir director and thought, “his shoulders are tense.” I instantly saw the irony in this. Figured I was probably wrong, but did not lose the impression that he held his head and neck in an odd way.
After some chit chat, he began asked me to stand from my sitting position and then return. Then he began to lightly touch my head, neck and back. He asked me to repeat my movements. Assuring me that vitality and quickness was a good thing, he suggested I move a bit slower and repeat the action as he touched me.
He asked me to take a few steps in the room so that he could watch. Then return to sitting and standing.
I could feel a slight awareness of my neck and shoulders. A lightness. I knew I was sitting up in the position I sit as I play. Which means pretty good posture. Fatigued from the weekend I was surprisingly relaxed throughout the lesson.
We worked on sitting and standing for a while. My teacher constantly speaking and suggesting ways for me to respond. His rap was intentionally vague, I thought. Avoiding too many concrete directions. Except in terms of thinking.
He variously suggested I think a gentle “no” to pushing my head down into my neck as I move. He suggested I think of standing as being not a movement of the head and upper body so much as a movement from the hips and legs.
He lavished praise on me often. Cautioned me about worrying about getting it right. To just move.
After a while, he asked me to lie down on a padded table and proceeded to gently position my body.
My head was elevated on books so that it was in a natural position to my body. As he positioned my feet, legs and arms, he asked me to neither resist or assist him.
This was the point that he told me had noticed that my feet point out when I walk. I wondered when he would get to that. He said he was just offering an observation at this point. But he mentioned this as he carefully positioned my feet under my elevated knees. Clever man.
He gently suggested that if I put myself into this lying position that it was an activity. A… what did he call it?…. can’t remember the term. I remember thinking of how I ask choir members to relax but stay alert… “up at bat” is the metaphorical image I use.
Later I asked the teacher about using images like “floating” when trying to achieve what he was asking of me (the books call this “primary control” but meaning that one is inhibiting one’s conscious direction to movement and holding one’s self… not primarily directing).
He suggested that metaphorical thinking was more assessment at the end of the process and that it could actually disturb it.
Interesting because he himself did use a metaphor for space and thinking.
His metaphor was to consider the brain or the head as though it were a house. To begin in the basement, move up to the first floor, then the second and finally to the spacious open attic.
It was in the attic that he wanted my thinking. The basement he eventually let slip was the “emotions”… the “feelings.”
Working on the table I was able to get a strong sense of space above me on the ceiling (he talked to me about silencing the voices in my head at this point) and also over my head as I lay prone.
He guided me to standing. This was funny. He said usually students do one of two things as he guides them to standing from laying on the table: they either are too active or too limp. Dead weight was the word he used. I’m pretty sure I was the latter. Heh.
Anyway, as I left the office I felt refreshed and relaxed. The lesson cost 55 dollars which seems reasonable enough. An important thing I learned is that Alexander technique is an awful lot about thinking or not thinking or even thinking “no” to ones direction as it were.
I’m chewing on it today. Pulled out some of my AT books and will probably do the active prone position today. Maybe some sitting and standing.
I am a bit numb today due to all that went on this weekend.
The more I consider my “jazz” playing on Saturday evening, the happier I am with it. When I improvise, I do try to make it like a coherent composition. In my own little way.
My organ prelude came off very well yesterday. I had a bit more time than usual due to the choir having the Sunday off. As I waited to perform the tricky little piece I had scheduled by Emma Lou Diemer, I played it silently on the organ with all the stops turned off. This seemed to help.
After church, I came home and Eileen and I finished up the left-over Kashmiri (chicken for her, veggie for me) from our Friday meal. Yum.
The afternoon recital also went very well. My biggest task (accomplishment?) was soothing some of my singers who seemed a bit distraught (terrified?). Performing can excite odd emotions in people. Emotions that can block their ability to perform. Yesterday I attempted to walk the line between challenging people to do their best and calming them into a perspective that enable this. I had some partial success. This is an ongoing dilemma working with volunteer singers and limited rehearsal time. But I was quite happy with the result.
The next biggest challenge was developing and delivering a spontaneous rap to go along with our little concert.
I was looking to establish an atmosphere of a relaxed, good humored experience of some good music performed competently and interestingly.
I was thinking about Alex Ross’s comments on Poisson Rouge: relaxed atmosphere with live musicians talking about their work.
Judging from the smiles and enthusiastic response of the listeners yesterday I think I probably did this fine.
The small little room where we performed was pretty packed. We had to set up extra chairs and ran out of programs even after people offered to share programs.
The crowd was interesting. Although there were a few parishioners, it seemed to be largely non-parishioners. At least one of my choir members was a bit chagrined by the lack of response from the church community. I responded blandly when he made this comment. But now I feel like this might be a pretty good thing for this kind of concert. Raising the visibility of our church community and expanding our presence in the larger community. Not a bad thing. And there was a stack of money in the basket designated for donations to our food bank program run in conjunction with Feed America. cool beans.
Now of course I feel pretty drained.
I won’t be able to avoid some church tasks today. I have to choose preludes and postludes for the upcoming services this week: Ash Wed and Lent I. Right now I can’t envision what more a full time version of this job would entail. Besides a bit more pay. Which I could of course use.
I am hoping to get paid more than a pittance for my work Saturday night. It is possible because the people in charge are musicians and can probably tell what they are getting from me is worth remunerating.
In the midst of all this I have been in conversation with some people on my Google Buzz thingo about the 17 year old German author who made a prize winning novel about re-mixing recently. In her novel she not only uses this theme but demonstrated it but recycling other people’s writings in hers. This caused some consternation.
I have been trying to refine the conversation and response to include more nuance. Probably unsuccessfully.
Here’s a link to the NYT service article about this:
“Plagarizing author, 17, is finalist for prize”by Nicholas Kulish [link]
& the reading I suggested to my Buzz conversation partners:
I like this quote from the beginning of the Barlowe essay:
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.” – Thomas Jefferson
Also there is some very fun stuff in the Harper’s article linked above in which Lethem pulls a Heggemann by writing about borrowing and doing it at the same time. Good reading.
Yesterday was another of my busy days. I am very proud of the final program for today’s recital. I wrote extensive notes and had Eileen and Charles Huttar (an English prof from church) proof and comment. The final product runs to 8 pages. I think it will add to today’s experience.
I was contracted to play a gig last night which turned out to be much more work than I anticipated.
I arrived at 4 PM to find that the rest of the band was downstairs playing video games. They provided me with a red bow tie and cummerbund.
They confirmed my suspicion that these were part of their band uniforms. (The bass player’s Dad is their band director) I sort of felt like one of those movies where the middle aged person is transported back to high school.
Yikes. We didn’t get started for a while. And we played very sporadically all evening with long long breaks in between.
The occasion was a Valentine’s meal for First Reformed Church here in Holland. There were two scheduled meals: The Early Bird and the Later Meal. We ended up doing 4 or 5 sets over about four hours. I got done at 9 PM.
The only problem with this is that it was the Saturday night before a very big
Sunday. So I need my energy today and am a bit tired. But I will do fine.
Playing with the other musicians was very interesting and fun. The sax player began to be more intuitive about who does what when. That was very satisfying to witness. The bass player and drummer are very fine intuitive musicians. They play and adjust well.
I had fun improvising. I usually do.
And it was comical the way the three other musicians sat on the couch in the Teen Center in the basement of the building and played Star Wars video games on a large screen TV.
The drummer loaned me his Mac and I was able to go online. During one of our longer buy genuine diazepam breaks I drove home and got my own netbook.
So today the Youth Choir sings and that makes a bit of an easier morning.
My boss is taking the weekend off and that means I need to be a bit more vigilant to make sure we start on time and that things run as smoothly as possible in her absence.
I have scheduled a kind of tricky prelude (which I mentioned in previous blog). Despite having tons of prep for today yesterday (I also bought cookies and lemonade and stuff), I managed to get about twenty minutes of rehearsal on this piece by Emma Lou Diemer. I hope it goes well. It’s a cool piece.
I am meeting the custodian at 1 PM to set up the performance area.
The choir arrives at 2:30 PM (in theory) for an intensive rehearsal. 4 PM is the scheduled time for the concert and we should be out close to 5.
It’s actually not too hard of a day for me.
Today should be a "piece of cake" for jupe
Much easier than the day I played my solo organ recital recently. The music today is much much easier for me.
I will have to tune the harpsichord a couple of times before 2:30. I have it sitting in the coffee room in the hopes that it will advertise what we are doing this afternoon to people from church who have not noticed and might want to attend.
It’s hard to predict the attendance. I made 50 programs. I am thinking the audience will be around 40. There are about 15 performers including myself. We are setting up five tables. Eileen is making lovely rose centerpieces and we will scatter Valentine candy around as well as provide some lemonade and cookies. It’s not exactly Poisson Rouge, but it will do.
Poisson Rouge in NYC. Not where I am playing today.
Yesterday morning, after breakfast with Mom and Eileen, I had them drop me off at home. Then I did a rough draft of the program for Sunday’s recital and sent it off to my proofreader.
It turns out I was the only composer to set the assigned text for yesterday’s meeting. And apparently the only one besides my friend, Nick, who hosts and organizes the thing to reserve the date. Jupe the anachronism persists.
Eileen rode over with me and I had a nice chat with Nick. We reviewed some of his commissioned Xmas stuff, a Gloria from one of the absent composers and my little composition I did this week. Afterwards Eileen and I had a lovely buy valium australia meal at the refurbished Bombay Cuisine. I pointed out to Eileen the datedness of the name of the restaurant (It’s Mumbai, now, right?). But the food is good there.
We arrived back in Holland by 4 and I trundled off to church to practice harpsichord and organ. A very full day.
Today promises to be full as well. I want to do a final copy of the program, grocery shop, do bills (both Eileen’s and mine and Mom’s), make bread, practice, treadmill (didn’t get to this yesterday), play a 4:30 PM gig and email my composition to all the composer people who couldn’t make the meeting yesterday. This last task was one Nick requested.
It was just in yesterday’s blog that I whined about not having conversations about musical composition. Then, as I was waiting for high school students to get their shit together to practice, the high school band director dragged me into his office and asked me a compositional question about a jazz arrangement he is working on. Cool.
My high school students sure have a weird way of practicing.
Both of the rehearsals scheduled have not begun on time. All of the music they gave me in the first rehearsal was ignored in the second. Of course, I had taken all their loose sheets and put them in sheet protectors and alphabetical order.
A couple of the players have good ears and their playing reflects it. One guy (I’m trying to be a bit deliberately vague here so as to not be creepy.) seems to not notice when people are giving off standard signals about what is happening in the music such as soloing and ending. These are high school students after all.
Although I think it would have been easy to do some gentle guiding or even to take charge more, I chose not to do this. Instead, I tried to sort of go along with whatever they were doing and let them call the tunes.
This is in stark contrast from a rehearsal earlier in the day with the string players from my trio. Unfair to compare really. But I am having a ball working with these musicians. We rehearsed stuff for Sunday. Then I suggested we read a slow movement from a Mozart piano trio. What fun really.
After supper last night, Eileen and I stopped at Meijers and I bought an ink cartridge for our printer. This enabled me to come home and do a final edit of the piece I wrote this week for the Grand Rapids Composer group and then print up a few copies of it.
When I played it on the Midi option from the software I use to write out music (Finale, same as the aforementioned band director), Eileen especially liked the little piano part I wrote for it. I feel like the Grand Rapids Composer group does keep me thinking about composing and sharing with other composers. Not all bad.
I have my first ever Alexander Technique lesson scheduled on Monday. I’m very interested in how this will go. I learned about this stuff from reading Robertson Davies.
Robertson Davies
He is another author I have read a lot of and enjoyed immensely.
Of course I ended up scheduling some organ music for this Sunday that is requiring some preparation. It would be a good Sunday to glide through the service since I have an afternoon recital. The adult choir is only singing at the recital. The youth are singing this Sunday.
But I found two compositions based on the tune of the sequence that weren’t too bad. The really interesting one is by Emma Lou Diemer.
Emma Lou Diemer. I'm playing one of her compositions on the organ this Sunday.
It is dissonant and very cleverly written so that the prominent melodic elaboration of the tune is accompanied by clusters of chords and bass runs that also move carefully if obscurely like the melody. Emma Lou Diemer is one of those church musicians that might inspire a bit of a sniff in many trained church musicians. Some of her work is kind of hokey. But some of it isn’t. And actually needs to be rehearsed. She is 83 years old at this writing. According to her website [link] she is still an active concertizer and seems to continue to produce compositions. Admirable.
Besides the trip to Grand Rapids today with Eileen (she has the day off), we are taking my Mom out to breakfast. She will probably want to pay. She usually does. This counts as my weekly “try to get her out of the apartment” trip, I guess.
I don’t have so many links today because I haven’t had so much leisure time this week. Drat. I try to goof off more than anything else. On the other hand, I did get a ton of stuff done this week, cleaning, composing and prepping for Sunday.
It just tarnishes my self image as one who spends his life goofing off. But toujours gai, archie, toujours gai. There’s some life in the old gal yet. As mehitabel the cat says.
Not much time to post again. I crammed a lot of stuff into yesterday and have a lot to do as well. What happened to my happy go lucky life style?
Yesterday I got caught up in a little composition project for tomorrow. I meet with some composer types in Grand Rapids. Our fearless leader, Nick Palmer, gives us a text to set and we all set the same one. The text I set yesterday was the Roman Catholic Ash Wednesday Introit from the biblical book of Wisdom: “Lord, you are merciful to all, and hate nothing you have created. You overlook the sins of men and bring them into repentance.”
Happy stuff, eh? Anyway, even though this religious stuff, it is one of the few arenas now where I can get people to talk to me about composing. So what the hey.
Anyway, after a nice online chat with my daughter Sarah in England, I quickly did my bulletin paragraph for Sunday and then settled in to several hours of composing. Sheesh.
I needed to get more done on the program for Sunday’s recital but it fell to the side. That will be today’s project: to get a rough draft of it done.
I also have to do dishes, exercise, meet with the string players for a rehearsal, meet with my boss, meet with the high school kids to prep for Sat gig (they managed to fill up their snow day and canceled yesterday’s rehearsal). So onward and upward.
I was so busy cleaning and organizing my kitchen yesterday I didn’t have time to do much thinking and skipped treadmilling.
I did hear this on NPR while driving through snow to take Eileen her supper at work.
William Wright of Chandler, Arizona called our obituary [John Murtha] very informative, but took issue with our wording. We said Murtha won two Purple Hearts and the Bronze Star in Vietnam. Wright says: U.S. military service is not a contest where personnel win declarations, they are awarded and receive declarations. [link to transcript on NPR]
Oh yes. Words do make a difference.
Turning military service into a game show in on air obituary needs to be challenged. Thank you, William Wright of Chandler, Arizona.
I chatted on the phone with my adult daughter, Elizabeth, for about an hour yesterday.
She was madly doing her laundry and chatting with me on the run. I had thought of calling her on Monday night but fell asleep instead. She said she was thinking of me on Monday as she was going out to the famous Jazz club, “The Blue Note,” with a friend.
Today, she is supposed to fly back to Miami to continue assisting with Haiti relief for the next month. But judging from the weather reports for New York, it seems likely her flight will be canceled.
I notice that Google is launching a PR campaign about it’s new social network software. Unfortunately, it hasn’t made it available to this Gmail subscriber. Sigh. I use Facebook quite a bit and they just made some changes that confuse the order of how messages are read.
The intent seems to be to provoke more clicks and keystrokes but it seems to have slowed down interaction. I could be wrong. A clean connectivity web site doesn’t seem that hard to design. However many of the online companies forget that even though advertisers are their customers, their end users are the ones they need to serve with ease of use and simplicity. Just my cranky old opinion.
I’m on page 158 of Kate Atkinson’s first novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum.” While I am enjoying it, I do see that I like her other three novels more. She seems to be evolving some of the acerbic wit she displays in “One Good Turn,” “Case Histories,” and “When Will There Be Good News?”
I ripped a bunch of Schubert to my hard drive yesterday in between ransacking my incredibly full kitchen pantry. The pantry is now much more clear and a bit more organized.
Yesterday at mid day my kitchen was full of pots, pans, return bottles, fabric shopping bags, and other stuff. It was difficult to get from one side of the room to other. Whew.
So I don’t have much to blog about today. My brain seems to go on hiatus when I spend the whole day cleaning. Today I need to do some dang church work (recital program, bulletin prep).
At 3:30 I meet to rehearse with the little Jazz group I play with Saturday evening for a church valentine dinner. That’s me. The old guy in the corner playing Jazz with three high school students.
I am working on my own burnout. When I seem to be lacking perspective and balance more than usual I suspect I am stressing out a bit more than needed. I guess if you look closely at yourself you can always see your own lack of these things to some extent (at least I can). Eileen and I have decided to go away together soon for some R & R. I haven’t had a Sunday off in quite a while.
In the meantime I am doing stuff to keep myself sane.
I have already been pushing furniture around this morning. I have a side room from hell stuffed with books, music and sundry other disorganized items. I am gradually moving the books. Yesterday I took up some more of the B’s. (yes I have most of my books in order by author). I would like to clear the side room to make it sort of a study room for me. Where I can have a mess and close the door.
I also did some serious cleaning in one corner of the kitchen. I cleaned my former cat’s favorite window sill which still had his dirty paw prints on it. Re-organized my hanging pots and pans.
In between all this industriousness I was playing through Bartok’s Allegro Barbaro for piano (Slowly!)
and I started thinking about the fact that Bartok was writing at the same time as Scott Joplin.
I started comparing dates and discovered that Joplin wrote his opera, Treemonisha, the same year Bartok published Allegro Barbaro (1911). Then I decided their aesthetics had some interesting corollaries.
Bartok’s rhythms and tonal language was influenced by his collecting Hungarian (actually Magyar formerly thought of as Roma) folk music. So Bartok dips into the non-academic source for music.
Joplin seems to have longed for legitimacy even as his own music contains contained wonderful aspects of African American musical rhythms, melodic conventions and notes. I think of Joplin as pre-Jazz because one interprets him music completely differently from Jazz. In other words, the performance conventions of “swinging” the rhythm (playing runs unevenly in one of several possible ways…. doo be doo be doo be) and improvisation really are not appropriate for Joplin’s stuff.
I mostly know his rags.
Yesterday I pulled a bunch of piano pieces by Bartok and Joplin off the web and made a play list that alternated between their works. I found this very satisfying.
I fell in love with one Joplin piece I don’t remember hearing before.
I especially like Tom Pascale’s recording of it. You can find it on Piano Society Free Piano music web site (link) along with a ton of other recordings of Joplin. I pulled down all of Pascale’s and quite like his interp.
I also downloaded some free (legal) mp3s of Bartok piano music. You can poke around on the Piano Society yourself if (zeus forbid!) you actually like this kind of music. Heh. I like Chris Beemer’s interp of Bartok’s lovely lovely Ten Easy Pieces, myself. (link)
I also decided I want to read everything Kate Atkinson has written (see yesterday’s raving). So I checked on what my local library owns so I could get started. Went and checked out these two:
and
Then I ordered up free copies of titles I didn’t recognize from Paperbacksway.com. (link)
If you don’t know about this organization and like books and don’t mind mailing books to swap for other books, you should check this out. It’s a guilt free way of getting rid of books (second copies and whatever you don’t want) and then obtain other books.
I have five credits and spent two of them on these two books:
and
Sometimes I get a bit carried away and read everything I can find by an author. This is one of those times.
