Health Report
My hives and itching persist despite having finished a regimen of prescribed steroids. I messaged my doctor through the online access to Spectrum Health. I will phone after 8 AM when the office is open.
My weight has been falling. I have abstained from alcohol the last three nights and plan to continue doing so. My BP is still elevated but not climbing.
I am using lotions and showering often for some relief. Sheesh.
More about Gallery Music
It turns out that the New Oxford Book of Carols published in 1992 represented a bit of a change in how church music scholars, especially English ones, approached music like the Gallery Music mentioned in yesterday’s post. Like so much good scholarship I am reading in many fields, this represented a much more inclusive and broader look at music from many more traditions and practices. This predated and seems to have influence the first conference on the renewed interest in Gallery Music convened in 1997.
While beginning to learn more about this music and the subsequent flowering of Victorian hymnody, I kept returning to my hymnal collection. I haven’t really looked at the Anglican hymnals, so much as Hymnal 1982. I wasn’t finding any of the tunes from this period. Then I discovered through my reading that not only were there representatives of this practice in the New Oxford Book of Carols, but there is actually an essay about them in the appendix, “The English ‘Gallery’ and American ‘Primitive’ Traditions.”
This inspires me to add a more thorough reading of all the extra stuff in this wonderful collection as well as persisting through the papers of the 1997 conference.
New Music for the Choir at Grace
When I was music director at Our Lady of Lake, Holland, I purchased multiple copies of the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols. As I revamp my approach to my job, I have been thinking about Christmas as a bit more of a peak of the season than I have in this gig. I am planning on considering learning some larger organ works to use. That reflects my down playing the week to week organ pieces mentioned before. In addition, I find myself thinking about the wonderful choral music in the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols.
Yesterday I emailed a bunch of staff members at Our Lady of the Lake offering to buy their set of Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols. It looks like I could get copies of this $27 book for $20 bucks new from Barnes & Noble, so I offered to pay $5 a piece for whatever they were willing to part with.
Before too long I heard back from their current music director telling me she would box their 21 copies of it up and drop them off at my house.
Wow! I hope this happens. This would be quick access to some wonderful music and a good addition to the choral library where I work.
The rest of my Wednesday
Eileen and I had a lovely breakfast at the Biscuit yesterday. They had an item on the menu that consisted of french bread smeared with cheese with large chunks of heirloom tomatoes on top, sprinkled with fresh basil and delicious balsamic vinegar. Two eggs came on the side, but as Eileen said, it didn’t really need the eggs.
This inspired us to pick up some heirloom tomatoes and chevre on our Farmers Market trip yesterday (we had already had basil and balsamic vinegar).
In addition, we purchased lots of good, fresh stuff from the market. Eileen bought a bunch of blackberries to make jam. Blackberry jam is her favorite jam.
We decided to have chevre and heirloom tomatoes for lunch at home as well. Amazing stuff.
In the afternoon, Eileen helped me shift a bunch of books in my ongoing attempt to get stuff in order. This set me up so that while she makes jam today, I can attack authors A through B which are a mess. I can’t believe we have managed to get my books so much closer to being in order.