This morning found me rummaging around in my book collection looking for books I own and have read or consulted about music and liturgy.

James McKinnon’s Music in Early Christian Literature was cited in his article, “The Fourth Century Origin of the Gradual” which I mentioned yesterday.  I knew I owned it. I was happily surprised that it was in my collection of books on music under McKinnon. It’s a compilation of excerpts where music is mentioned in many early sources from the New Testament to St. Augustine. Very helpful.

I was then inspired to look further. I went through a period where I lost all interest in most of my liturgical books. I discarded many Roman Catholic reference books. Now as I look through my collection which is in serious disarray I wonder if a book I am thinking of was tossed out.

This morning when I attempted to access my new Washington Post subscription I got this message.

I was trying to access what they call the “ereplica” version of the day’s paper.

Yesterday I was pretty impressed with it. Today not so much. I did finally get it to work as I was composing an message on their feedback site.

Yesterday Eileen’s Mom and sisters and cousin Janet visited to see her loom.

It was fun to see her extended family so fascinated.

Afterward we all traipsed off a local watering hole Eileen has recently eaten at: The Parkway Inn Restaurant. The poster above was on the wall. I thought it was pretty cool.

I met with Rhonda Edgington and Gordon Bruns yesterday to go over the AGO Installation service to be held here on Sept 15. We have invited other chapters to join us for this service. I put together a working order and we edited it and filled in the players.

After this I grabbed some lunch and met with Dawn Van Ark, the cellist from my piano trio (and musician at Grace). We played through a couple movements of the Brahms cello sonata. Dawn later agreed to attend Rhonda’s party and perform the first movement for fun. Very cool.

Then Amy arrived and we played through one of my favorite movements of the Bach E Major violin sonata. Dawn and Amy agreed to perform this at the party. Dawn left for work. Amy and I went through some Mozart’s violin sonatas and landed on one for the party as well. This gives me some very cool music to practice.

I’m hoping my ballet class actually needs me this morning. I plan to be in place at 8:30 with bells on and see what happens. It’s hard for me to complain since not only is this a needed extra source of income, it also provides me with fabulous online access which I utilize regularly.

This morning a footnote in Bradshaw’s The Search for Origins of Christian Worship caught my eye. It cited a scholar I recognize and have read: James W. McKinnon on updated understanding of how the psalm entered the Christian Mass. I was able to use my online access to get a full copy of his article: “The Fourth Century Origin of the Gradual,” Early Music History 7 (p. 91-106). 

While it continues to annoy me that ideas are behind firewalls online, I still take advantage of the access provided by my status as staff at Hopeless College. Cool.

The Washington Post: Digital Subscriptions Sale: 1 Year for $19

Speaking of online access, I couldn’t resist the above subscription. The sale ends very soon. Whut ah bahgain!

My first Wednesday of my new schedule turned out considerably different than I anticipated. I should have known that the ballet department chair would decide at the last minute (as she has every semester) to combine classes without notifying the accompanists. Thus when I arrived at my 8:30 class I was joined by the other pianist who drives from Grand Rapids. A quick consultation with the chair decided that he would play the class and I would not but also bill the college for the time. Fair enough.

I immediately went to the church and practiced organ since I wasn’t sure when I was going to get a chance to do so later that day. I came home just as Eileen was leaving for the Farmers Market. I then read and practiced piano for an hour. There was a 10:30 AM meeting at church I had been invited to (a sound system meeting with a vendor). I decided to skip it even though I thought I was free and exercise instead.

When I sat down to lunch with Eileen I realized that I had been scheduled to play an 11 AM class and had been confused about it and not shown up due to the early dismissal at 8:30 from my first class. I did meet with my boss at 1 and did my only ballet class of the day at 2 apologizing for not showing up to the teacher who also taught the 11 AM class. She indicated that I had not been needed since the chair of the department was using these first classes to sort out students. Weird.

After my ballet class I zoomed over to church for a meeting with another sound system vendor, left that a bit early and drove to my piano lesson.

At the end of the day I wasn’t as exhausted as I had feared. But also I didn’t really have the full day of classes.

Today I have some tasks for work (write a bulletin announcement, submit different music for a week from Sunday’s bulletin). I also have to prepare for a meeting with Rhonda and Gordon about the AGO installation of officers service which I previously volunteered to sketch out. Then it looks like I will be able to rehearse with the musicians in my piano trio as a trio and then work on solo music with each of them separately. That should be fun. I have been trying to get the Brahms cello sonata first movement into shape for today’s rehearsal ever since i learned that the cellist wants to go through it today.

I keep reading David Byrne’s How Music Works. I think I would like to ask him some questions about the classical music world such as it is. His description of the origin of the Talking Heads style as “minimalist or conceptual art with an R and B beat” confirms in my mind his art background (p. 257). A few pages earlier he makes the astute observation that “popular culture is the water in which we all swam” (p. 249) The “we” is his band and other musicians/artists he knew and admired at the beginning of his career in NYC.

I think we all are basically still swimming in the popular culture. My questions are how does any received intellectual thought and aesthetic relate to this. I know that many are embedded in the present culture, but I suspect fewer and fewer people do.

1. In Aftermath of Missouri Protests, Skepticism About the Prospects for Change – NYT

Some good on the ground reporting in this article.

2. The Drinker’s Manifesto – NYTimes.com

I figured I would probably have to quit drinking by the time I reached my fifties due to its bad effect on my body. But I’m sixty two and still not feeling ill effects from my alcohol use. Lucky I guess.  I remember Anthony Burgess writing that he thought he was getting the age that he should probably quit drinking.

He lived to be 76.

3. He Has a Dream – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd is understandably pretty fed up with President Obama. She also spends a lot of this column tearing up Rev. Al Sharpton.

4. How the Supreme Court Protects Bad Cops – NYTimes.com

A Law School dean rips up the highest court of the land. As he says in the article: “Deeply disturbing.”

So the college part of my schedule begins this morning at 8:30 AM. I have been assigned classes with breaks in between. 8:30 to 10 AM, then an hour break, 11 to noon, than a two hour break, 2 to 3 PM. Those breaks are challenging. Today I’m thinking of reading/practicing during the first break. During the second, I will have lunch with Eileen, then meet with my boss. Today after the 2 PM class I go back to church for a meeting with people deciding what kind of sound system we should purchase. Then at 4 PM I drive a few miles north to give my one student his piano lesson.

Eventually I will end Wednesdays with a choir rehearsal. I’m pretty curious to see how I hold up under this schedule. By the end of the school year last spring, I was exhausted physically and mentally. I’m hoping I can strategize in ways that will address this in the upcoming year: pacing myself better and getting lots of rest. We’ll see, eh?

Eileen will do the Farmers Market duty today. We made out a list and I gave her the twenty dollars I had set aside for it. I have been cooking more. Last night I made the Fish Fragrant Aubergine dish I have been making. Eileen doesn’t eat it, so I made some rice to go with leftovers of stir fry I made earlier. When I stir fry I tend to make a veggie version and a carnivore version. The cooking is a hopeful sign that I am truly getting a bit of my groove back.

Eileen went with me to church yesterday afternoon and helped me sort music. This has been on our agenda for a while. I worked with her for about an hour and then started poking around trying to decide about what choral music to choose for upcoming stuff. I had the unfortunate insight that I should start the choir earlier than I had planned. That means a week from this Sunday, on Sept 7,  I am inviting choir members to come and sing a one rehearsal anthem. I have also invited them to sing the following Sunday, Sept 14. Then I go to China and they get the 21st off. I will resume with an easy anthem on Sept 28. I think it looks doable.

I changed my mind for two reasons. First I read where a colleague of mine ran a creative Summer Sing for choir people who are off during the summer. He invites people to come and sing through a major choral work together. No performance just a read through. He also asks them for a donation for costs and prepares soloists. I thought that was pretty cool. Here’s a link to the article about him he posted on Facebooger.

Summer of sounds: Choristers keep up with the music – Connecticut Post

The other reason is that I was planning Sept 7 which is my church’s “Kick Off”Sunday and I thought it would be weird to not include the choir.

When the church changed it’s orientation (they flipped the room around so that what was the front altar now became the back area where the choir remained), it literally turned its back on the choir. I have pointed this out to my boss ironically. The choir is a motley crew and I have difficulty getting members of the church to join us. It has crossed my mind that we are too eccentric for them. So it’s important to keep the choir on board.

Well if you have read this far you have noticed there aren’t many pictures. That’s my solution to blogging in less time. Now to get ready and leave for class.

1. Gateways to the Classical World – NYTimes.com

This is about apps for true geeks (greek geeks?). I have been thinking that the next time I replace my personal laptop I will seriously consider going Apple. Same for phone. I find the Windows 8 the last straw, especially on our larger laptop. It moves slowly and seems to get confused between touch screen and touch pad and cursor. Plus all the current apps seem to show up first on Apple machines.

2. Malala Yousafzai: By the Book – NYTimes.com

You remember this young woman. She was brutally attacked for her stand on education and women in her country. She has fascinating reading habits.

3. ‘Excellent Sheep,’ by William Deresiewicz – NYTimes.com

I keep reading reviews of this book. In this one, a Princeton prof disagrees a bit with some of what Deresiewicz says but still thinks it’s an important book.

4. Inside the List – NYTimes.com

This is a weekly column in the NYT Sunday Book Review. This week, Jennifer Szalai talks about Murakami and asks a question I have thought of: namely,  how far are the English translations of his work from his originals. And she also has some witty stuff on Dinesh D’Souza (pointing out the origin of a Robert Frost quote he uses).

5. Jacqueline Woodson’s ‘Brown Girl Dreaming’ – NYTimes.com

This book review not only inspires me to read the book being reviewed but also Nikki Giovanni’s Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day which the reviewer mentions.

6. ‘Building a Better Teacher’ and ‘Getting Schooled’ – NYTimes.com

I don’t know why exactly but education continues to interest me. This review is thoughtful and worth reading.

7. ‘The New Arabs,’ by Juan Cole – NYTimes.com

Even though the reviewer points out that this book is written for boomers about a younger interesting generation, it still sounds excellent.

8. Cornel West: “He posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall street presidency, a drone presidency”

I love Cornel West. I read the hate of Obama on Facebooger and I am hesitant to pile on, but West gets it right from the left.

9. Dealing With Digital Cruelty – NYTimes.com 

I  don’t really experience digital cruelty. I do however experience a bit of a small shock sometimes by what people are saying in the public of the internet (usually not anonymously). This article helped me see it more clearly.

10. A Memoir Is Not a Status Update – The New Yorker

A reminder that life is real.

After my usual Greek study this morning, I turned to the gospel for next Sunday in Greek. I know. I know. I have lost my mind. But practicing reading Greek, any practice, is good for my Greek. And I know the stories of the readings pretty well so the excellent interlinear text provided by biblehub.com which is amazingly cross-linked makes it easy to at least pronounce out loud the passage as well as understand about a third of the words.

This morning the Greek word σταυρός caught my eye. It’s the word Jesus uses when he says take up your cross and follow me: “Take up your stauros and follow me.”

First I checked the OED for “star” wondering if the English word was related to “cross” somehow.

But the OED shows that “star” is one of those words that is common to languages I don’t usually think of related to each other like Sanskrit and Latin/Greek. In fact, I don’t know if you can see it, but the first use of the word in English cited is a quote from Psalm 148:3 Hergað hine alle steorran & leht.

Once again by Googling this verse, I ended up at Biblehub.com.

I count 20 translations linked in on this page (click the pic for a link to it). So just for giggles I looked up “cross” in the OED.

I don’t know if you can read the small print, but “cross” seems to mostly descend from Latin, “crucem.”

So what does the Greek stauros actually mean? Googling took me back to Biblehub.com.

This page actually cross indexes the gospel passage I began with in Matthew 16. Cool.

After Greek I turned to Paul Bradshaw’s The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy. I am trying to read this little book before it’s due back to the library at Western Theology Seminary.

The ideas and controversies about where the Christian Mass came from and how it evolved is one of my interests since I became aware of them years ago. It’s interesting to me that Bradshaw footnotes scholarly articles by both Rowen Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury (3 times)

and Joseph Ratzinger who is better known as Pope Benedict XVI (1 time).

One article in a footnote caught my eye this morning. “Is There a Liturgical Text in This Gospel?: The Institution Narratives and Their Early Interpretive Communities” by Andrew McGowan. I have been assuming that my online access to liturgical sources such as the one this article is found in (“Journal of Biblical Literature”) is pretty limited. Most of the online subscriptions that Hope has are more academic than liturgical of course. Western Theological Seminary might have hard copies, though. So again just for giggles I went over to the online catalog which combines both Hope and WTS and checked it out.

I was surprised to find that Hope’s subscription to JSTOR includes archival access to old copies of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Within seconds I was looking at the article.

I do love the interwebs. One of the things that interests me in Bradshaw’s overview of scholarship is how the Biblical passages about worship relate to how people prayed then and now.

Friday after stopping off at the bank I dropped into LemonJellos and had a chat with Matt Scott about his change in running live music. I was surprised to learn that he had a profitable five years of doing this. Also I was surprised and relieved that this run began after he started paying his musicians. He mentioned to me that I was influential in the process of deciding to do so.

I told him that I could never understand how he afforded to pay his musicians. He said that he often did so out of his own pocket which is something I knew. I remember the last couple times I played there, I rented a piano. Matt offered to pay for it at the time but I wouldn’t let him. I’m glad I didn’t since he probably was paying for it out of his pocket. Better I should do so since there were cheaper ways to do the performance and I wanted a real piano for the Mendelssohn piano trio and my composition “Dead Man’s Pants.”

I tried to be supportive of Matt and shook his hand.

I continue to mull over what music is and how people get it into their lives and ears. I keep plugging away at David Byrne’s How Music Works.

Both Byrne and Matt Scott fascinate me with their orientation toward music as business and commodity. This morning as I was reading Byrne I learned that the change in MTV from a video channel to a reality TV channel was precipitated in part by record companies demanding fees for material they had previously provided for free. I remember MTV as very interesting in its first few years. Then completely losing interest in it.

I finished reading The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood yesterday. I am enjoying her writing quite a bit. In The Year of the Flood she creates a religion of ecological aware technical people called “God’s Gardeners.”

Each chapter begins with a transcription of a sermon by Adam One, the leader of the group, about the feast they are celebrating. Atwood creates a whole liturgical array of new saints: St. Euell (Gibbons), St. Rachel (Carson), St. Dian (Fossey), and more. The sermon is followed by a hymn Atwood has written. It’s great fun. These books don’t take themselves too seriously but at the same Atwood uses her grim witty humor to make some terrible points about how we live now. I started the final volume of this trilogy last night: MaddAddam.

Huff Post Entertainment – Required Reading: 10 Books We Read For Class That Will Change Your Life

I’m a sucker for book lists. On the list linked above, I found a couple of books that interested me.  Thomas McKenna recommended two books I had not read,

” [A] brilliant professor recommended I seek out Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady and Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. They’re both Westerns, specifically stories set at the closing of an old era and the emphatic beginning of something newer, and more uncertain. The former is a small novella and the latter a big, sweeping opus of a novel, but both are extremely similar in the way they interrogate family responsibility, the myths of the frontier and the American Dream, coming of age, what it means to be a man, and how one registers loss.

Woo hoo.

I found the Cather free online, but the Stegner was a hefty $11.99 on Amazon for the Kindle book. I have read both authors and enjoy their work. Yesterday when I was making my weekly library trip to get my Mom new books to read I checked the shelves and there was The Big Rock Candy Mountain sitting there. Cool beans. I started reading it also yesterday.

I have been taking too much time doing my blog posts. While I enjoy this, I can see an impending schedule which will require me to be a bit more judicious.  This morning I spent an hour or so on Greek, then read in my Dieterich Buxtehude bio, listened to a Buxtehude cantata with score on screen (I love the interwebs), went to the Farmers Market, came home and laid in bed with wife and read online articles (some of which are linked below), had late breakfast with beautiful wife and only now am getting to my daily blog.

I really only have a half hour for this because I want to exercise before noon when I am able since this seems to tire me out a bit less than doing around 4 PM as I have been.

Yesterday I was trying to pick out organ music for a week from Sunday. I found a little piece by Charles Ore based on the sequence hymn (tune name: Bourbon). The closing hymn will be Jerusalem Hymnal 1982 style by Parry. I have been listening to the hoary old English dudes like Holst a lot.

I went down to the office at church and logged on IMSLP and found some cool stuff. A piano transcription of Mars from Holst’s Planets (pdf), a reduced score of the Second Suite for Military band (link to pdf), an organ transcription of movements from the First Suite by Holst (you have to scroll down for them)  and some organ pieces by Stanford which seem to fit the mood of Parry as well (pdf). I chose one of those. Hey. Cool.

1. [Talk]: African musicians in search of the ‘Chinese Dream’: beyond the narratives

1.5 hour video embedded here that looks interesting to me. Maybe I’ll watch it sometime.

2. Put Down That Bucket of Ice Water. Read Lou Gehrig’s Story. Learn About the Science

One of the articles I read in bed this morning. I learned more details about Gehrig’s story from it.

3. To Avoid the Multiverse, Physicists Propose a Symmetry of Scales | Simons Foundation

This one blew my brains. Again in bed this morning. See why I’m rushed?

4. Why Liberal Pundits Are Wrong About the Perry Indictment 

As I said when I posted this on Facebooger, this article changed my mind about the story.

5. A Terrorist Horror, Then Golf: Incongruity Fuels Obama Critics – NYTimes.com

I know President Obama is getting shit for this. But it only reminds me of Friedman’s insight years ago that our stuck society will routinely attack people who attempt to lead.

6. Study Finds That Brains With Autism Fail to Trim Synapses as They Develop –

Some recent autistic science… again I learned stuff.

7. Housing Restrictions Keep Sex Offenders in Prison Beyond Release Dates – 

Whenever I read about sex offenders who have served their time and still face weird restrictions I am reminded that there are truly those who are repressed in our country due to who they are and will not be able to reenter our society at all. Link to review of book I have read: Loss Memory of Skin by Russell Banks on this topic.

8. Hawks Crying Wolf – NYTimes.com

The main thing I got from this article was this:

They should be listened to politely — good manners are always a virtue — then ignored.

I think this also describes a pattern of behavior I would like to cultivate, whether in person on online.

The local coffee shop where I did a lot of performing in between church gigs a while back has announced that it is no longer going to run live music.  I met Matt Scott, the owner of the shop, while he was working for Till MIdnight a restaurant. We chatted briefly about his tastes in music and books. He told me about his work as a drummer in a CCM (contemporary christian music) band.

When Till Midnight decided to close its coffee shop section of its restaurant, Matt  jumped at the chance to start his own in the same location.

I remember going down with my guitar and sitting and playing and singing at this point attempting to encourage him. Not too much later Matt began running live music. After a few years I challenged him to pay his musicians (which he was not doing other than splitting the extra cover charge he sometimes charged when they were playing). He seemed to take this to heart and did begin paying them. Not a great amount. But I always wondered how he afforded it.

I noticed that he was not really playing drums that much. I tried to involve him in the music asking him to sit in with me once and also hired him to do a gig with me at my brother’s church.

Matt quit asking me to perform a few years back and never indicated why. Fair enough. I suspected at the time it was a combination of my own eccentricity, my old age, and the fact that many of the young CCM bands were competitive and did not see me as a colleague.

In fact the last time I performed the owner insisted that one of the other bands do my mixing and they killed me.

The performance survived but in retrospect I sometimes wondered how much had been deliberate sabotage of another act.

No matter.

Yesterday I rehearsed Mozart violin sonatas with Amy Piersma my friend and colleague. It was lots of fun. It has been a life long goal of mine to read the Mozart and Bach violin sonatas. They are amazing music, challenging and fun for me.

While we were practicing, Amy said that the music we were playing would be well received in a luncheon situation. She thought we could sound pretty good and it would be interesting and exciting. I replied that I also felt that we should share this wonderful music in some way, but didn’t really know how. We both know we could perform at my church, but Amy is a former member and this is not comfortable for her.

I also attended a noon recital by my friend Rhonda Edgington. Pillar Church, a local conservative Reformed church, runs noon organ recitals in the summer. The first year she was here, Rhonda was invited. Then the second year not. She seemed to suspect that she had played too esoteric a program. This year she was asked and she mixed it up a bit, playing well as usual.

What interests me is how the idea of  working performing live musicians is so alien to how most people listen to, seek out and appreciate music in their lives. People still spend their lives learning a music craft, but unless they are willing to enter commercial consumer type situations, the number of places for them to perform is very limited.

Matthew, the owner of Lemonjellos, offers some ideas of why his audience for live music dwindled in his blog. I don’t think he nails it in general, maybe it applies to his situation.

non hominubus sed deo

I was reading in Snyder’s bio of Buxtehude and she relates that his motto was “Non hominibus sed Deo” (Not unto men but unto God.) While I feel atheistic most of the time, I think Buxtehude’s idea of looking beyond the audience to a larger concern whatever it is makes sense these days. I think that music is intrinsic to being human, but even unrefined music seems in the USA to be more and more a matter of passive consuming than making it for yourself or with others. More refined music (whatever the style) has probably always had a much smaller audience. So when I offer up my music it’s often helpful for me to be thinking about the more cosmic conversation between me , the music, the composer (if not improvising) and the idealized listener than gathering too much energy from a dull and disinterested people in my immediate viscinity.

Wednesdays are shaping up to be my day from hell this fall. I have three ballet classes scheduled with a two hour wait between the last two. During this time, my boss and I agreed to schedule our weekly meeting and see how that works out for me. Next Wednesday is the first day of classes. So in addition to my three classes and my meeting with my boss I have to return a second time to church for a meeting about the sound system purchase. Then I have a 4 PM lesson scheduled with my one piano student, Rudy.

After I get back from China, this day will end with a choir rehearsal.

I seem to be over scheduling myself but I don’t know exactly what to do about it. Wednesday will be the worse day. Monday I have the same schedule of classes. On Friday  I just have two morning classes. The return of my ballet accompaniment work is a welcome addition to our income which has diminished considerably since Eileen retired early. So it’s hard to consider cutting back much more on that work. At this point I have told the dance department that I would like Tuesdays and Thursdays off and they seem okay with that. Presumably if I said I needed to work fewer hours they would deal with that as well.

Eileen and I have paid off or are about to pay off all of our debt except our Discover balance. This frees up a considerable amount of monthly income that was going to paying off the Equity loan and Eileen’s car. We are hoping that all of this together will give us a bit more breathing space in our weekly budget.

I have been trying to be strict with myself on how much money I spend each week on groceries. Yesterday I only had twenty dollars left in the budget for the Farmers Market trip. I managed to be very careful but still returned to the car to look for change to buy potatoes.

So for $24 I bought blueberries, peaches, peppers, heirloom tomatoes, a melon, garlic, and potatoes. Life is rough, eh? I also did a fair amount of cooking this week, making evil quick cheese bread since we were running low on bread and excellent marinara sauce.

This all makes for pretty good eating for Eileen and Steve. So we aren’t exactly suffering. And there seems to be money left over for gin and Baileys.

I do wonder about my aging aching body.

Each day I have aches and fatigue. Uh oh. I also exercise each day, but do wonder about this ongoing exhaustion and aches.  I’m not sure the old axiom “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” obtains after sixty for this old fat guy.

I was chatting with the soloists who sang at my church Sunday. One of them remarked that it must be satisfying to accompany a large group of singers at church services. I replied that it was.  It is one of the rare times in our culture when everybody gets to do music. In the course of this conversation I pointed out how lucky the three of us were to have music in our lives.

I thought of this yesterday as I was playing through piano music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

On the drive back and forth to Grand Rapids on Monday I listened to the Califax recording of the Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues. These are amazing piano pieces which the group Califax has transcribed for their reed quintet.

Subsequently I played through some of the Shostakovich on Monday and Tuesday. The first prelude and fugue is simple but beautiful.

Here is Shostakovich himself playing it.

This music made me think of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas.

From time to time I rehearse them. The slow movement of his Sonata 2 in D minor is beautiful.

Performed by Frederic Chiu, Piano.

Recently I was thinking of my high school Wind Ensemble and our performance of a suite by Gustav Holst. I think learning this piece with a Wind Ensemble had a formative effect on me. Over the years one  sometimes calls up similar materials for improvisations. I realize that the ascending figure of the first movement is probably where I first heard an easy  happy theme to improvise on.

I recall a trumpet solo I played in the slow movement, but it sounds like the trumpet may be doubled with clarinet and other reeds in the recordings I have heard. Also I think the way Holst combines Greensleeves with a little dance in the last movement is charming.  It would make a cool transcription for an organ piece.

I made a treadmill playlist which included the Holst Suite, a couple of the Planet movements I like and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony movement one. I remember playing a piano transcription of the latter when I took lessons as a kid. But that’s another story.

1. Jim Jeffords, Who Altered Power in Senate, Dies at 80 – NYTimes.com

One of the old breed, someone you could possibly believe was acting on principle.

2. In China, Myths of Social Cohesion – NYTimes.com

Bending ancient myths for contemporary purposes.

3. Study Details Elephant Deaths – NYTimes.com

The Oryx and Crake trilogy makes me look at these ongoing tragedies even more intensely. In the trilogy there is an important online game called “Extinctation.”

4. Is Gov. Rick Perry’s Bad Judgment Really a Crime? – NYTimes.com

All reports I have read about this seem to indicate that Perry is indeed the subject of partisan attack by elevating his misconduct to a felony charge.

5. 5 common self-sabotaging statements – Waking Up in Wonder

Flattering that this blogger linked in an old post of mine when she was looking for online copies of Mary Oliver poems. I love the interwebs.

One of my goals for the summer I guess is realized: making the porch more usable. Sunday Eileen and our friend Barb Phillips sat out here. This morning I lit oil lamps and sat and read, listening to the rain. Nice.

Driving back from the eye doctor in Grand Rapids was a bit stressful. I hadn’t realized they would dilate both eyes. Even with sunglasses I was unable to focus well at a distance. This was a bit disconcerting, but I could maneuver the car well even though I could not read traffic signs until they were about fifty feet away. It made me appreciate the color coded stop lights. Fortunately I knew exactly where I was going. Next time I’ll ask Eileen to come and drive me home for safety’s sake.

When I complained later that I felt exhausted and depleted, Eileen pointed out to me the combined stress of waking up to a bat in the house and going to the eye doctor. I think she was partially right. Sometimes after a strenuous music performance I sometimes feel like all my nerves are on the outside of my body and at the same time  I felt sluggish and unmotivated.

This weekend was a stretch for me. I probably over prepared the wedding since they requested a long list of favorites. No one really seem to be paying much attention. And then there was the added bonus of not getting paid (still haven’t gotten paid).

Sunday my piano prelude by Mendelssohn required a bit more technique than I had time to prepare. I am glad I did it. It was a pretty good performance. Probably I did it a bit under the usual tempo. I haven’t subjected myself to recordings yet and Mendelssohn didn’t give a metronome marking. The melody to this piece is, I may have mentioned here, in the middle of the piano. The hands toss it back and forth. When it’s not playing the middle melody, the right hand is busy with two octave arpeggios. Also the melody must be prominent, so the other  (more difficult) parts must be softer. I pulled most of this off.

Accompanying the singers was a bit tricky as well since I don’t think I heard the duet at the same tempo they did. The piece is marked Andante but we landed on a tempo of 80 beats per minute. I guess this is Andante (usually thought of as a walking tempo). But my little sixteenth note figures took on an odd urgency at this tempo. But I did my best to do it their way. Our second run through before service was our best performance it seemed to me. In service there was a frisson that wasn’t quite under control in the ensemble. But it was still pretty exciting.

The organ postlude (also by Mendelssohn) was a bit more prepared than the other stuff. Not sure why. I spent the same amount of time on it as the piano piece. It may simply be that I am a better organist than pianist. There were a couple of pedal runs which went very well since I practice the heck out of them.  This was the first organ piece I learned using some of Barbara Kraus’s  ideas in the English translation of her book on practicing the organ. Her techniques definitely helped me.

 1. The Mysteries of My Father’s Mind – NYTimes.com

Another wrenching story of caring for an aging parent whose mind is slipping away. I liked the quote:

“Without memory, there is no home.”

2. The Obituary Lottery – NYTimes.com

It matters when you die because someone else more important or a news story may dim your prospects of surfacing in obits. I love obits.

3. Playing Soldier in the Suburbs – NYTimes.com

If any good can come of the Ferguson madness maybe becoming aware of how militarized our local police have become, especially in terms of equipment. Scary shit.

4. Where’s the Justice at Justice? – NYTimes.com

Definitely a conundrum. A president who was  former law prof is presiding over a repressive approach to press freedom.

5. Should We Teach Plato in Gym Class? – NYTimes.com

Not sure this author has it exactly right but he definitely is pointing to something important that is missing in our culture. He calls it thymos (spiritedness). I wonder if it’s even more broader and includes passion and strength of conviction and other stuff.

Today is a my twelve month check up with my eye guy, the surgeon who performed the surgery to reattach my retina. It’s in Grand Rapids at 8:30 AM so I am planning to leave the house around 7:30 to get there.

So I got up early so I could still have my morning. I noticed that Edison was sitting in an odd place on my electric piano. Then I noticed there was a bat flying around the room. I decided to go ahead and make coffee and then deal with it. I put the water on, cleaned the coffee pot. Then I decided to try to usher the bat outside. The tricky part is not allowing my irrational fear of it to get the better of me. This morning I managed to do that.

Barb decided to spend the night so I quietly closed her door and began trying to cut off areas where the bat could fly. Finally I got him in the front closet area where I bravely (!) used the broom and dustpan to gently grab him and throw him outside.

This is satisfying to me because the janitor at church will simply wait for the bat to land then kills it with a hammer. I prefer not hurt it if i can.

I finished the first volume of Atwood’s trilogy, Oryx and Crake. I had forgotten enough of it that it was still engaging the second time as well noticing things that I might have missed the first time. Like Atwood’s wry sense of humor which is pretty subtle.

She describes Jimmy/Snowman as being comforted when he silently lists off words that have been forgotten. He is remembering them consciously since he thinks he might be the last homo sapiens sapiens alive.

Atwood herself uses words in her prose that I didn’t recognize. Like helot (Greek class of slaves that were half way between ordinary slaves and free citizens).

Atwood herself is pleasantly sometimes drunk with language. Jimmy’s lists of words are often related to the story she is telling even though he is supposedly savoring these words as a form of solitary comfort.

I started The Year of the Flood by Atwood which is volume 2. It too seems pretty familiar.

Yesterday was a pretty challenging music day at church. I have been assiduously preparing a piano piece and an organ piece by Mendelssohn to match the duet the singers asked if they could sing at Eucharist. Both keyboard pieces were a bit of a stretch for me. I won’t say that I “nailed” them a hundred per cent. But I did play them pretty well and as well as could be expected with a few weeks prep.

I have had two full music weekends in a row. Last weekend I rehearsed and performed with the Holland Symphony (plus church). This past weekend I had a huge funeral and a wedding (plus church). After my doctor appointment in Grand Rapids today I will probably try to take the rest of the day off.

So Eileen went off to the Fiber Fest with friends while I stayed home and did a funeral and a wedding.

The funeral was packed. There were two small choirs that sang. I played Bach suite movements on the piano and a slow movement from a Mozart piano sonata. Then switched to organ and played Air on a G string by Bach since I had already prepared that for the wedding.

Jen doesn’t involve me in the planning of funerals and weddings. It’s just as well since they are often headaches. It may be that she spares me because I’m not a full time employee. But I suspect that it’s just easier for her.

We have had two funerals recently where we sang “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

The Hymnal 1982 has an unusual tune paired with these words but states that they may be sung to Dix which is the more familiar tune. The last time they occurred at a funeral, I cautioned Jen that it was probably not the tune people expected. She said go with it anyway, which of course I did. That group sang it well. Surprising.

So when I posted the hymn numbers on the hymn board on Friday I noticed that we were singing it again yesterday (Jen often sends me only the titles of hymns not their numbers in the hymnal and I keep forgetting we sing this hymn to a unique tune). I thought what the heck. I had mentioned once to her and she was right.

And this group sang it pretty well as well.

The choirs were a bit weird to me. The first choir sang a choral arrangement of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen.

They had sort of an opera chorus blend and were producing their voices classically which made Cohen’s song sound kind of funny to me (“What’s it to yaaaa?”). I admit that I don’t think that song is one of Cohen’s particularly good songs and can’t hear it without thinking of Shrek.

Also I find a blended choir more attractive than an opera chorus blend.

They let the second choir which was all men sing The Lord’s Prayer. I don’t really give much of a fuck about all of this, but it is a classical case of taking away the prayer from the assembly and giving it to an elite (visiting) group. Doesn’t really work as liturgical prayer, but of course it’s always questionable just what kind of praying goes on at funerals and weddings anyway. They sounded okay, but again the arrangement was hokey with lots of ooed echo sections.

At the end of the funeral they sang “Tis the gift to be simple.” Jen had at first asked me to do it on the piano. We had this conversation as I played Mozart.

Then she asked me if I had planned to do it on the organ. I said yes and asked her why she wanted it on the piano. She said I should do what I had planned and apologized for being last minute. When I persisted she said she wanted it to be gentle and asked if I would play it gently on the organ. I said I would, not really understanding.

The Hymnal 1982 version of this Shaker song is quite like Copland’s which threw the group off a bit at one point. Also it is only one verse and chorus. After we had sung it once I began again hoping the assembly would want a second go at it. No dice. I cadenced and began another time but no one sang. Oops. Not a terrible spontaneous group of white people, eh? I should have seen it coming.

At the wedding, a brother of the bride played a few tunes alone on viola. He was mildly autistic and charming. He made a respectable sound. During the Unity Candle he played Dix (For the Beauty of the Earth). Heh.

I found a check in my box for the funeral, but no one from the wedding paid me.

One out of two isn’t bad, I guess.

One of the things I love about the interwebs is the ease of access to things I’m curious about. Kerala Snyder mentions the painting above in her bio of Dieterich Buxtehude but doesn’t provide a plate of it. The man sitting with the piece of paper and his hand to his ear is Buxtehude himself.

The man seated with both hands on the lower manual of the harpischord is Johann Adam Reinken, Hamburg musician extraordinaire.

He commissioned the painting and is wear a kimono. Nothing like seeing this stuff when you’re reading about it.

The above article is about Brad Richmond’s sabbatical to South Africa. (Like institutions and organizations everywhere Hope college is weird about putting this stuff online. I couldn’t find the article. But here’s a link to pdf and flash portal for this issue.) I heard him talk about his ideas before  he left and I think he’s on to something. Basically his insight is that in the USA we no longer use our voices to speak the way we used to. Nor do we use them to sing easily. Brad attributes this to technology. He may well be right. I observe that when people stand up to address a crowd they don’t seem to have any idea of how to project their voices. Instead they grab for the microphone and then continue to produce their voice softly with lack of breath support.

In South Africa on visits to perform with his Hope Choir, Richmond realized that the people he was meeting were not doing this. They were using a much better supported voice not only in singing (where training is imperative for any choral technique) but also in their daily lives.

Another insight Richmond has had is the connection between supported speaking and singing and overall physical health.

Interesting stuff.

1. Web Trolls Winning as Incivility Increases – NYTimes.com

I was accused once of being a troll when I attempted to enter a discussion on Facebooger on the page of Democratic Governor Candidate, Mark Schauer. The talk was so partisan that any questioning of the approach was interpreted as an attack from the other side. Sheesh. I never attempted that again. Fuck em.

2. Ferguson Images Evoke Civil Rights Era and Changing Visual Perceptions – 

The ongoing problems in Ferguson Miss are creating a lot of hate talk on Facebook and Twitter. Yikes. The author of this article has some interesting insights including

Today, the imagery one sees depends on the filters one uses. One person’s Twitter feed may be full of footage of police firing tear gas or of peaceful protesters with their hands up,,,

3. Ferguson Shows the Risks of Militarized Policing – NYTimes.com

I am fascinated and relieved to read much of the coverage of this incident which is asking some questions I have had for years. Confusing soldiering and policing is endemic in police departments. Several years ago our local cops through the owner of a coffee shop up against the wall in order to intimidate him about noise ordinances. At the time I thought it was weird policing since the dude they were throwing around is small and pretty religious as far as I can tell.

I continue to be drawn to Greek. I have a little notebook with the table of the 24 endings for the definite article I am trying memorize in it. I prop it up while I’m doing dishes or other stuff so that I can constantly review it.

In his “Hablo-Greeko” section of his wonderful web site, Pagan Origins of the Christian Myth, Greg Kane adjusts the expectations of would-be independent learners of Greek while giving helpful encouragement and tips. He says it takes many months to basically get off the ground and many many more months of prep before attacking the JACT texts (the ones I now own in two editions and have been stupidly fondling and looking at for years).

It was partly due to his encouraging words that I branched out recently and began reading in the Greek New Testament online.

Yesterday I started work on choosing choral anthems for the next year. Eileen allowed me to spread out on her new desk/bench thingo. It works great for this.

While cleaning out the porch I ran across this collection of my Mom’s jewelry. I took a bit of it over with us yesterday when we went to join Mom for the Fish Boil at her nursing home.

She didn’t want any of what I took over and she didn’t think anything was a family heirloom, so Eileen and I spread a bunch of ear rings on her table, photographed them and sent out to possibly interested family members.

My granddaughter put dibs on the pink ones with stars above and another set in another pic I emailed out. Cool. I have set them aside for her.

I went over to church yesterday afternoon and spent a few hours polishing up music for this weekend. The wedding is a long list of top ten wedding tunes. I have been practicing them a bit more for some reason. Also it’s Mendelssohn Sunday and I have three pieces by him (a duet accompaniment, a piano solo and a organ solo) I am learning. They are sounding pretty good. I have high hopes of nailing them.

‘Excellent Sheep,’ William Deresiewicz’s Manifesto – NYTimes.com

This is a book review I read yesterday while treadmilling. It’s sort of predictable since it critiques many of the lamentable trends in our current education.

I think about this stuff a lot. Facebooking helps me remember how hysterical and incoherent people can be around inflammable issues. I find myself more and more indifferent to the partisan squabbles even though I am clearly stereotyped as a brain dead liberal. I guess this okay and probably even accurate in my little pea brain.

I find all the noise made by politicians, bad media (Fox), and partisans so very distant from what seems to me to be important things to be thinking and talking about.

Due to the overwhelming response of pictures of my porch, here’s an update. This is the messy end of the porch tidied up a tad. Note the modesty wall and the oil lamps.

As you can see it’s still pretty messy behind the wall and of course all the files and desks are stuffed.

W

We are settling in nicely in the other end of the porch. Now if it would just warm up a bit we could sit out there comfortably.

The back of the vines makes a lovely view on the west end of the porch. Eileen decided we should put our oil lamps around. We went to Bibles for Mexico yesterday and she bought some new glass chimneys because all but one of the old ones were broken. At her suggestion I put them around the room.

I do love the old lamps. Now we’ll have to keep an eye out for some more shades.

And now pictures of food

Eileen got up and decided to make french toast. I like to have something savory with this kind of sweet breakfast so I made a veggie curry. I have been using diced ginger and garlic in dishes like this. It’s pretty good.

I restrained from putting pictures of food up on Facebooger (this time anyway). But here they are for you!

I had a real nice breakfast.

Yesterday my boss didn’t show for our weekly meeting. I knew where she was. I saw that she was in the weekly bible class. Melynda the staff person said they were running late. I went and practiced. This is the Ray Ferguson method of life: never waste time you could be practicing.

After about an hour or so, I wandered downstairs and my boss was in a meeting with a parishioner. I was texting her a second time when she came out and asked me when our meeting was. She looked deflated when I told her. She apologized and said that her day had “blown up” and that the now retired assistant had made appointments for her that she hadn’t anticipated.

Of course I told her it was fine.

The soloists for this Sunday (duetists?) showed up and we rehearsed the Mendelssohn duet. I think they sound great! It will be a classy Sunday.

Classes begin at Hope on Aug 26th. They have kindly offered me the same schedule as last time.  This means classes on MWF. Unfortunately there is a two hour gap between them on M and W. But I think that will be okay. I have already informed them I will be in China for a week in September and they are good with that.

I am trying to pace myself with church work. Two weeks ago I chose hymns for the upcoming year. I skipped a week of big effort because of the Holland Symphony gig. This week I want to begin working on picking choral anthems. The organ committee however took up energy yesterday so I limited my other church work to submitting the music for the bulletin for a week from Sunday.

I can see your eyelids drooping from all this fascinating information.

Today I will concentrate on meeting  with my boss and rehearsing with soloists for this Sunday. I think that will be my church work for today. Maybe I can started on the choral stuff tomorrow.

The organ committee wants to hear one more builder, Martin Pasi. We are looking at a field trip to Chicago to hear his Opus 15.

This instrument is at St. Paul and the Redeemer.

That should be fun.

I continue to baffle myself with my interest in religion and liturgy. This morning I found a really cool online site which has an interlinear Greek New Testament. Here’s the chapter of Matthew which contains this Sunday’s gospel. Click on the pic for link.

I thought it would be good practice for me to look at upcoming readings in Greek. I own a Greek New Testament but the print is small. I found several online versions and like this one the best so far.

1. F.B.I. Steps In Amid Unrest After Police Kill Missouri Youth – NYTimes.com

This does not sound good.

2. Scientists Create a 3-D Model That Mimics Brain Function – NYTimes.com

I love this shit.

3. Can the G.O.P. Ever Attract Black Voters? – NYTimes.com

I think the answer is no.

The party that hopes to attract black students is the party whose congressional leadership filed a baseless lawsuit against the first African-American president. It is the party whose representatives allied with birthers who demanded that the president prove his citizenship. It is the party that has endorsed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and made it more difficult for the very people it is courting to actually cast a ballot for its candidates

One of my summer projects is to clean out the porch so we can use it. As you can see above, Eileen and I made some headway yesterday on this. Notice the windows. I took all the curtains down to wash. Eileen made these years ago.

I threw them in the washer and then Eileen rehung them.

The clutter is now all on the other end of  the porch. Sigh. I will attempt to organize and get rid of some of it before snow falls.

Also on my summer reading list is Margaret Atwood’s trilogy which begins with Oryx and Crake. I have read this before but thought I would reread it before reading the rest of the trilogy. It’s another future apocalyptic novel by Atwood. I started it yesterday.

I started Paul Bradshaw’s The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, Second Edition this morning. I continue to be bemused by my attraction to things religious. Liturgy in specific continues to interest me for some reason. Bradshaw’s book is an examination of literature and techniques on the subject. I find that I recognize much of what he is discussing and find that his analysis informs my previous understanding and educates me into better and more current approaches to this scholarship. So what the fuck, right?

While I’m indulging in obscure weird reading, I have begun Philip Baxter’s charming little survey of Sarum Use. I’m sure I bought this when I was in England in some shop, probably the Westminster Abbey bookstore. It may have been the Oxford U Press bookstore since that press publishes it.

Cranmer was well aware of the Sarum rite (used in England) and borrowed from it. That’s Dr. Cranmer burning above. This illustration is apparently from an edition of Foxes’s Book of Martyrs.

Before reading MacCulloch’s bio of Cranmer I sometimes perversely thought of reading this book (the Book of Martyrs), but MacCulloch points out a great deal of omissions and distortions in it (especially in the English version) that now I would be uneasy unless I was reading an annotated up-to-date edition (if such a thing exists).

My latest Greek project (besides the daily reading) is to force myself to memorize the above table.  So far I have about twelve of these in my head. I copied the table into my Greek notebook and prop it up so that it’s visually obvious as I do stuff.

After I get the definite articles, I will memorize the above conjugation which is the simplest Greek verb form. Notice how religious stuff seeps back into my life via my interest in Greek via the Biblical references for the specific verb forms.

Why fight it?

1. A Judge Rules for Alabama Women on Abortion – NYTimes.co

detailed and cogent debunking

2. Intervening in Our Name – NYTimes.com

Why we should pay attention

3. Sentencing, by the Numbers – NYTimes.com

Sometimes statistics are the wrong way to go

4. The C.I.A. and Torture – NYTimes.com

Before the USA can recapture any sense of its historical goals, it must abolish torturing people.

Eileen left church early yesterday so that she could go to Chicken dinner with her Mom and some family members. I walked home and decided to improvise a wok curry.

It was as good as it looks. Then I settled down and finished reading The Round House by Louise Erdrich.

Eileen is reading this book as well. We both purchased a Kindle Daily Deal copy of it. On Saturday evening in the park as we were waiting for the concert to begin, we both were reading our copies. I was reading mine on my Kindle on stage and she on her Kindle Fire in the audience.

I enjoyed the book. It was a good summer read. It is told from the point of view of a young man on an Indian Reservation. His mom gets raped. His father is a judge. The ideas of Indian life and law in the 21st century are probably at the heart of the story. The plot is gripping in a murder mystery way.

This morning I got up and finished MacCulloch’s The Later Reformation in England, 1547-1603 while listening to a thunderstorm here in Holland Michigan.

It’s a good short study of what happens to England right after Cranmer’s execution. MacCulloch is interested in where the English church came from. So am I.

I  am planning to try and take today off. Even though I persist in having a self image of a bum, I find that being one takes up a lot of time and energy in activities that drain me. So four days of musical performances and rehearsals requires a bit of time to recuperate.

I like doing this on Mondays anyway if I can. I can’t neglect some organ and piano practice but that’s not really draining. I am planning to perform two Mendelssohn pieces next Sunday, one on piano and one on organ. I am learning both of them for the first time. Yesterday they both went smoothly when i rehearsed them. This is a good sign a week before when I plan to play them in public.

I received some nice comments this week both at the symphony and at church. After the symphony concert one of the string players complimented me on my keyboard playing. That was surprising to me. Yesterday before church a woman came up and gave me some gift cards she had made and told me she was giving them to me to thank me for my music. Also, Jodi the curate and Laura the person with a doctorate from ND simultaneously complimented me on hymn selections.

This is fun because yesterday we sang “Love lifted me.” Heh.

1. The Youngest Are Hungriest – NYTimes.com

In India, kids are smaller. Except for the first born boys.

2. Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain – NYTimes.com

Observations on the necessity of giving your brain some time to daydream.

3. Secular Climate-Change Activists Can Learn From Evangelical Christians – NYTimes

I like this guy’s attitude. Also I relate to him a bit.