Today could very well be the last time I accompany ballet at Hope. As usual the teachers are not forthcoming on how they plan to use the accompanists in the next semester. I expect Julie (the instructor with whom I have been working for the last couple years) to be very cordial at our parting today. I don’t think she suspects how badly the department treats peons like me.

Eileen pointed out that I charge more to teach per hour than the college pays me to accompany ballet. I told her I knew it, but in fact it hadn’t occurred to me.

I found my last conversation with Julie odd. Once again she asked me if I knew of any pianists who would be interested in accompanying ballet. She and/or presumably the department have ruled out my first idea which is to have student musicians do this work. Too many scheduling problems, she said. I think the departments are rivals myself. It certainly bothered the chair of the dance department to find out how much less he is paying pianists than the music department. He seemed upset but hasn’t communicated further with me.

I just checked and the dance department hasn’t posted any pics or bios of pianists yet.

She also weirdly indicated to me that one of the other pianists was not quite up to snuff. Sigh.

It will be a relief to have dance over. This is little ballet of back and forth is tiring. I have reconciled myself to not doing this work next term. In the meantime my second set of jacks is on its way to me. I would love to replace the effort I use for accompanying dance with assiduous work on refurbishing my harpsichord.

One of the important builders of my kit was Ray Fryer. His son, Ronn, was my friend at the time. Many of us were working on my harpsichord kit. Mr. Fryer was a carpenter. He saw what we were doing and simply took the basic box of the sound board away from us. He himself glued and constructed with the care of a master carpenter. I have always said that the extraordinary sound of the instrument came from Mr. Fryer’s work on it. Mr. Fryer passed away this week at the age of 94. Ronn and I are estranged, but I am friends with his ex-wife, Mary (Eileen’s sister), and his kids, Cindy and Jody, now adults whom I have known since their birth.

I am learning some new (to me) Bach for this Sunday. I had a good practice session yesterday on the F minor prelude BWV 534. I think I can only go so long without learning some new Bach or Buxtehude or something meaty.

I’ve also been goofing around with  a movement of Próle de Bébé (The Baby’s Family) by  Villa-Lobos. This work is a set of movements each one of which is based on a doll. I have been looking at “Caboclina (A Boneca de Barro)” (The Clay Doll).

Here is a fine recording of this movement.

I have this video bookmarked for random video shares on Facebooger. So you see I haven’t given up on sharing music. Sarah “liked” my Monday video and that’s good enough for me.

So yesterday morning found me on the phone with Steve Salvatore of Zuckermann Harpsichords. Mr.Salvatore had emailed me a generous offer of “splitting the cost” with me for a new set of jacks. This meant that instead of $182.40 for a set, I would instead have to pay $104.15 including shipping and handling.

This seem more than fair. I was hoping for some discount due to quantity. An individual jack is listed as costing $3.20. I gave him my credit card number on the phone and he promised to get them out right away. Bless his heart.

Confronting an exaggerated sense of self importance seems to be my constant state of affairs. Someone from church had invited me to post daily music videos I liked on Facebooger (as I mentioned here Sunday). Then she, my daughter Sarah and another musician friend living in Carthage , Tunisia, urged me to continue posting videos. “More please,” wrote the person who had invited me to put them up.

So I persisted. I noticed yesterday that compared to previous music videos I had put up under the challenge these later videos were not being noticed or at least not “liked” to the same extent.

In order to post videos of this kind I have to sort of keep an eye out for them and be sure to bookmark them when I find myself running across them. I guess I will continue for awhile. I suspect Facebooger of putting my video links lower in the “feed” of my “friends.” But who knows? Maybe posting them early in the morning is a bad idea. Maybe they aren’t as “wonderful” as my three encouragers thought.

I get it that seeing what music a musician likes could be interesting. But I also feel sheepish about the fact that I’m oversharing, once again.

Here are a couple of quotes I like from recent Writers Almanac shows.

I have been listening to this while waiting to take my blood pressure in the more. The length of the show is the recommended time one needs to sit still, feet flat on the floor, not talking, before taking one’s blood pressure.

“The word dysfunction has I think served its purpose and has now lost its meaning. Every family like every person is imperfect after all. The idea that there’s a family somewhere who functions is an odd concept.”

Susan Minot

“we shouldn’t be looking for heroes we should be looking for good ideas..”

Noam Chomsky

America Needs a National Slavery Monument – The New York Times

I’m for history and historical markers. It’s a bad time, I think, for people to be making decisions about this sort of thing. Too much misinformation and intolerance informing the public debate. Better to wait until heads cool, if they ever do.

Let Math Save Our Democracy – The New York Times

Supreme Court is looking at some pretty weird shit today. See the next link.

White Supremacist Law Group Has Scored Two Key Cases at the Supreme Court | Alternet

God help us.

How Terror Hardens Us – The New York Times

What saves us from the fear of death is culture, writes this author and other scientists she quotes. Terrorist incidents provoke this fear unconsciously. It then motivates lots of weird behavior. Vote for Trump.

Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature: How One of the Last True Polymaths Pioneered the Cosmos of Connections | Brain Pickings

I “follow’ Brain Pickings on Facebooger. Usually they rehash shit I already know about. But in this case, I learned something. Never head of von Humboldt, but it’s an intriguing idea how he was able to shift thinking and affect so many important thinkers.