Since a genius like Fanny Hensel spent her entire musical life in the shadows, it inspires me that living in the shadows musically, like I guess I do, is just fine and a worthy way to aspire to be a composer and musician.

I might as well mention my unhappiness with the music episode of the 1619 podcast here. When I first began listening to the presenter, Wesley Morris, narrate his ideas, I was discouraged that it was so anecdotal and a bit vapid. He describes spending some time a friend putting together a meal. They listened to a Pandora playlist the name of which I can’t make out. It consisted of Doobie Brothers, Seals and Croft. Morris was born in 1975 and seemed to relate to the music (as did I). Then he begins thinking about Black influence on the music he was listening to. This somehow leads him to a truncated discussion of the white invention of Minstrel Music but eventually sees Motown as a crowning achievement of Black music.

First I fact checked Morris a bit in my copy of Eileen Southern’s The Music of Black Americans (Third edition), and satisfying myself that he had indeed simplified the story tremendously (How else could you do so in a silly podcast?). Then I decided it would be only fair if I checked out his chapter in 1619 Project (the book). I learned that he can write good sentences which is no mean feat in my book. The music chapter begins much better then the podcast episode with him seeing a temporal connection between Birmingham Sunday (the senseless 1963 bombing of Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed young Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair) and the Motown music on the charts at the time.

This was more coherent.

Later I learned that Morris is a staff writer for the NYT magazine and critic at large for the NYT. He is the only person to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. And he has done so twice. It is confusing that he was asked to do the music section of this book and part of my frustration is the exclusive understanding of music as primarily popular culture and not art. I’m still reading his essay. I am expecting it to be better than the silly podcast he did.

And more importantly Adam Hochschild in his November 2021 review of the book version of the 1619 project helped me put the music comments in the larger perspective of what the book and the project accomplish. Which is quite a lot.

I am 100 per cent supportive and interested in learning the retelling and correcting of the history America’s slavery and subsequent white racism. And I have to grant that the 1619 Project had bigger fish to fry than my own love of music. Hochshild makes a very friendly, supportive, and clear-eyed critique and argues convincingly that the book and project ended up flawed but still very important. But he didn’t mention music.

So there’s that.

But I promised to mention how Virginia Woolf is helping me thinking about composing as well many other things. In my Thursday blog, I described how R. Larry Todd, the author of Fanny Hensel: the Other Mendelssohn, mentioned an essay by Woolf. His mention sent me up my stairs to see if the essay was in any of the books by Woolf I own. It wasn’t, but I did find a 1929 essay she published in Life and Letters a literary review of which I own a tattered copy.

The title of her essay is “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.” I read it and was reminded how often Dr. Burney is cited in the biography of C. P. E. Bach I am reading. Burney was a fan of C.P.E and spent time with him. Woolf’s essay is not about C.P.E. but still it continued to expose me to how I can very modestly identify with people (women specifically) who are shunted to the side in our histories and stories. In this case, young Fanny Burney daughter of the doctor and a prolific diaries and essayist as was Burney himself. The difference is that he got all the limelight and recognition.

But this is not near as important as the inspiration I receive from the continual music of Woolf’s sentences. Here are the ones in this essay I quite like.

“But there was, one vaguely feels, something a little obtuse about Dr. Burney. The eager, kind, busy man, with his head full of music and his desk stuffed with notes, lacked discrimination.”

“To his [Burney’s] innocent mind, music was the universal specific. If there was going to be any difficulty music would solve it.

There were others but these are the only two I marked.

Susan Howe continues to inspire. Here’s a quote of her remarks in an interview regarding how she makes poetry. It rang true in my mind and reminded me of what it’s like to compose music.

“You open yourself up and let language enter, let it lead you somewhere. I never start with an intention for the subject of a poem. I sit quietly at my desk and let various things—memories, fragments, bits, pieces, scraps, sounds—let them all work into something.” Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark

I keep thinking about a composition. At this point I am thinking of a three movement suite of sorts. Probably for Marimba/Congas, Violin, Cello, and possible Keyboard. More importantly in my mind I would like to have each of these three movements connect to a particular American expression: I. Native Americans II. African Americans (Spirituals?), and III. Appalachian Americans. At this point I am not thinking of using actual pieces from these traditions. I’m more interested in honoring these traditions that I admire and see as constituent aspects of American music.

It has occurred to me that the three movements should be medium fast, slow, and quick. I am dithering about how to approach this. This kept me awake early this morning. Each movement could feature an instrument such as Marimba/Congas on the first movement, Cello on the second, and Violin on the last. I am thinking of using the Violin in a bit of a fiddle manner.

One idea I am kicking around is to write a good melody and use it thematically in each movement. I haven’t decided to never use pre-existing melodies in my compositions. But it seems that this time I want to see if I could do this without directly using material in each tradition.

My relationship to making up music has been an odd lifetime obsession. The first time I went to college I majored in Music Composition. This was at Ohio Weslyan U in Delaware. By that time I had already written tons of music. But I knew I wanted more skills to help me. But I also remember doubting how helpful college would be to me for what I had in mind. Life intervened. I ended up quitting college and playing in a friend’s bar band for money.

I was still interested in making up music (composing). I continued to do so. In retrospect I can see that I detached myself from ways of learning that might have set me more clearly in one direction or another. I never studied composition formally again. I brushed up against more formal study when I was attending Wayne State where I finally got my bachelor’s degree. But the composition guy was definitely not interested in having me for a student even though I continued to compose and perform music at Wayne State while I was there.

Back when I was in the bar band, a friend told me of an opening for a keyboard player in a fancy Detroit hotel. He said that if I was at all interested in a Jazz career I should take this rare opportunity and go for it. I understood from his explanation that when big name Jazz musicians came to Detroit this was where they would often stay and sometimes came to the venue so that any musician playing there might have a chance to go forward in that career.

This amuses me to no end in retrospect since I know that I barely had the chops to do straight Jazz at that point even if I had been interested which I was not. After I left Delaware, and was playing in bar bands and running a used book store I continued to develop as a keyboard player but not under a teacher. This development has continued my entire life. After quitting bar bands and closing the bookstore, Ray Ferguson at Wayne State helped me the most, but I still see myself as mostly self taught.

To this day I understand myself as a peculiar kind of musician. Music has been my first love and I continue to need a daily dose to this day. In addition music via church music helped me and Eileen earn enough money to raise our family and now be happily retired.

Making up music and poetry and prose are very natural acts for me even if they don’t quite fit into easily understood descriptions. The action of making music, “musicking” if you will, ends up being the important part of my life long understanding of music.

This omits self-promotion and specialized understandings of just what music is.

Susan Howe in her book Birth-Mark, describes a larger understanding of poetic and archived texts that corresponds in my mind to Christopher Small’s enlarged understanding of music. She writes: “… presenting … texts as events rather than objects, as processes rather than products, [convert] the reader from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem while at the same time calling attention to the fundamentally historical character of both the reader’s and writer’s activity.”

Howe is working toward an active action of reading in which the reader is part of the evolving process. This reminds of how it feels to sit at my piano and play. The result is a “process rather than” a product.

Next time: how Virginia Woolf and Fanny Hensel are helping me process this.