When I told Dr. Birky that I came out of our previous session feeling helped and buoyed by it despite there being no direct insight to point to, he told me that was very “Rogerian,” the idea that having someone listen to you is helpful.

He is taking some time off so this time there will be a month between sessions. I told him I had read some Carl Rogers but in truth I was thinking of titles by Rollo May.

I pulled out my copy of Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers. I noticed that I had read in it and made notes in the back. I think it would be a good time for me to reread it between visits to my therapist.

Rogers insists that his insights are not just for therapy but for all relationships.

He summarizes his efforts this way.

1.  It’s better to be genuine to others. He tries to listen carefully to his own responses and avoid presenting a façade of one attitude while actually holding another.

2. He seeks to accept the one he is in relationship with. The more he can like and accept someone the better their connection.

3. Seeking to understand the other is the next step. I typically say that people make sense to themselves. Figuring out as much as possible about this can be helpful.

I am finding reading Rogers helpful and interesting. More later, since Eileen and I are heading for the beach again today! Woo hoo!

Yesterday I nailed the music at church. I felt good about all of my playing which is unusual. I wonder if it had anything to do with yesterday’s insight. The one about music being such a constitutive part of everyone and recognize that worth and ability not only in others but in myself. I’m not sure about that. But I do know that it felt kind of ironic that I had done much less preparation for yesterday than the week before. The music was easier. But not all that easy.

The congregation sang lustily and that’s always fun.

I mentioned my emotions yesterday. Their volatility is something I try to accept in myself. For example, I don’t listen to the NPR show “Story Corps.”

You probably know what that is, but in case you don’t it’s a tape made usually by two people talking about stuff in their life that has meaning. One sometimes interviews the other. A son interviews his father and stuff like that. Invariably they make me weep. I then also feel manipulated which is why I avoid listening to this show.

Yesterday when I was talking to Eileen about how wonderful I thought the small smile of the pianist and composer Conrad Tao at the completion of the Prokofiev sonata movement I embedded in yesterday’s blog, I began to weep. I am regularly overcome with emotion and weep, usually at beauty these days.

After telling her about this I mentioned how one of the critics in the link yesterday with all the music videos talked about hearing Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy played by Rudolph Serkin: “I’ll never forget the beaming smile that broke over Serkin’s face when he started playing the catchy theme of the joyous final section.” Again with the Niagara Falls.

Last week sitting by the beach I wept as I told Eileen how much it meant to me when Tyhimba Jess has his fictionalized Julius Monroe Trotter (a real person by the way) describe listening to the aging Scott Joplin play: “He launched into the next tune—I could hear him rasp the title—“Bethena.” This I had also heard my mother play—but while listening to the tune from I had determined by that time to be the composer himself, I suddenly knew it in a way I hadn’t ever imagined. Slower. Wrought.”

This meant so much to me because I know Joplin’s work and he always complained that people played his music too fast. It drew me into the story and gave it a new deeper authenticity.

This emotional energy is to a great extent in my genes. I see it in my Mom and Dad and I see it in my children and extended family  I am grateful it hasn’t been beaten out of any of us.

At EPA museum, history might be in for a change – The Washington Post

I only put this here because I think that climate change deniers are dramatically wrong.

Around the World in 50 Years – The New York Times

I just put myself on the waiting list of Less by Andrew Sean Greer the book reviewed in this link. I listened to a section of it recently published in the New Yorker read by him and recognized it from the review. It was definitely funny.

Trump Is Wrong if He Thinks Symphonies Are Superior – The New York Times

I link this hear because a respected New York Times music critic puts in print that he likes Eleanor Rigby is as profound as Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.

The Desperation of Our Diplomats – The New York Times

Interesting analysis. Diplomats weigh in in the comments.

Judging the Supreme Court | The Source | Washington University in St. Louis

I get all kinds of college magazines in the mail. This article caught my eye. It’s fluffy in places but  I learned stuff from it. I linked it on Fakebook as well.

Dr. Birky and I were talking about last Sunday’s recital this past Friday. After I described how I develop commentary for concerts to help people come closer to the  music, he said something like “because many people do not understand music” sounding a bit like he was confessing. I contradicted him. I insist that people are already musicians, artists, poets, dancers and so on. I am just trying to open a door to the music and invite people in. Music is a verb and is something we all do.

But admittedly I have many pangs of inadequacy myself. I know that I am not a virtuoso and most of the time don’t identify myself as a classical musician. However, just as I remind myself to be as kind and forgiving with myself as I try to be to others, the same should hold with my musical endeavors however meager they might be on any scale.

More clearly this means that if I think that all (or almost all) humans do music, then I get to be counted in that as well. Maybe this will help me get closer to the music I make. And slow down my nagging doubts about my abilities making more room for drawing into the music. These doubts are only in my emotions, not in  my will or my passion which do not seem to waiver.

Having said that, for you my small  group of readers, I share my listening this morning which came from this article.

Rhythmic Bite: This Week’s 8 Best Classical Music Moments on YouTube – The New York Times

I linked last week’s article like this but haven’t listened to the music in it. This morning I was drawn to this rendition of a Prokofiev piano sonata movement. I love the way this guy plays. I love that he is also a composer. I love the little smile on his face when he finishes. I think he is inside the music.

I confess that I don’t know this piece that Tommasini (the critic who recommends this recording in the article) says he heard at Carnegie Hall when he was in the seventh grade. But I like it. It obviously is paving the way for the Ninth symphony which I also like. As I age, Beethoven means more and more to me. I think it has something to do with the nobility of his music and ignobility of our times.

I noticed that it was just about a year ago that I decided to go back and review chapters in Greek I had supposedly worked through. This morning I began working on the second section of a new chapter I haven’t worked on before which uses passages (adapted I am sure) from Plato. I seem to be making progress of sorts.

Eileen and I just got back from the Farmers Market which was packed. This is a peak time for all kinds of produce and fruits. We are eating excellently but neither of us is dropping pounds.

I spent time with It’s Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. I am now in the second section of the book where they discuss remedies. The first thing they do is shoot down remedies or ideas they feel are inadequate. The first is the false assumption (according to Mann and Ornstein) that “The American Political System will Correct itself.”

What I like about these authors is that they are scholars of their subject. So when they discuss anything they footnote copiously and cite people on the other side of their observations and propositions.

The second “Bromide to avoid” (the title of this section of the book is the third party solution. Proponents of a third party solution to our present dire political situation postulate a “radical center” which could be appealed to. This “radical center” in some ways looks a lot like Trump supporters. Not all of the attributes they describe rhyme but enough do so to get me pondering. Is the Trump Republican Party so different from its progenitor (the old GOP) that is in effect a new party? This reminds me of the emergence of the new Republican party from the old Whig anti-slavery party. So that while not a classic third party, the Trump movement has attributes of a shift radical enough to be the emergence of a new party.

Jes sayin

I am looking forward to spending some time on the organ bench today. I feel like skipping it for a few days and hitting lightly yesterday has been a mentally healthy thing for me. Dr. Birky listened to me talk about last week and the curious blend of stress and achievement I experienced around my work. Again I found myself feeling buoyed a bit by his listening.

Eileen and I spent a couple of hours on the beach yesterday reading. I delved into Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. I am enjoying this. Here’s a poem she quotes and discusses.

Lars Gustafsson: The Stillness of the World Before Bach

It has been four days since I have touched the pipe organ. I have been deliberately taking time off this week in an attempt to pull myself closer to equilibrium. This morning I have an appointment with Curtis Birky, my therapist. I am looking forward to hashing over with him the highs and lows of the past two weeks.

At this point, after the appointment I am planning on sitting on the bench for an hour or so. This is a routine I have fallen into: shrink appointment, drive back to Holland and go directly to practicing organ.

Then Eileen and I have another beach day planned. This means grabbing something to eat and then after eating it at the beach sitting and reading for hours on the sand.

Yesterday I ran interference for Eileen to allow her copious time to weave. Normally she handles the Social Security and Medicare/Insurance tasks. But since the task yesterday was to sign me up for Social Security Retirement Income (probably not the exact nomenclature), it seemed only fair for me to do it myself. This turned out to be the best solution. Eileen was in the room weaving and open to questions as I plowed through the web sites, filling in information. Afterward she insisted that it had been much easier for me to do this than for her, so that worked out well.

I went to the post office and dropped off a package of stuff my brother left behind, went to the library and grabbed books for my Mom to read at the nursing home, then stopped off and said hello to her and gave her the books. Eileen stayed at the loom.

I have been getting a bit of reading in even when not at the beach. I’ll end with a short passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore I read yesterday and marked for further pondering.

“But his heart went out utterly to his companion, not now with that first romantic ardor and adoration, but painfully, as if a link were drawn forth from the very inmost of it and forged into an unbreaking bond. For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered and is not whole, and does not last.”

Regarding Derek Walcott’s  interview I mentioned yesterday, I was able to email myself quotes from it. Using them, I started a google doc of notes about him and Omeros. I do this from time to time: make a doc with my reading notes, often with books I do not own. But Omeros affected me so much. I realized that I missed some erudite allusions, not to mention, the subtleties of Walcott’s form. In the absence of a good reference book about the work I can use the interweb to nail down some of these allusions.

Yesterday morning laying in the morning dark I read the poem, Sea Grapes, by Walcott (also the name of his 1976 volume of poetry).

BY DEREK WALCOTT

That sail which leans on light,

tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean;

that father and husband’s

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa’s name

in every gull’s outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

between obsession and responsibility

will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant’s boulder heaved the trough

from whose groundswell the great hexameters come

to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

I love the ending line. But I didn’t really recognize Nausicaa. But a quick look at Wikipedia reminded me of her role in the Odyssey. This morning I ran across Walcott reading this poem. It’s short and worth a listen.

Also to continue from yesterday, I looked up Samuel Colerdige Taylor in Groves. He is in the same generation as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland and others. He was one of the group and thinking about his musical language as an outgrowth of his love of Dvorak and probably the English Pastorale school makes sense although I didn’t read anything specifically alluding to the pastorale school in regards to him.

Elgar championed his compositions. As did Stanford. Since he combines the stuffy Anglican background with an interest in African American music I find him interesting to say the least. He seems to have taken to heart Dvorak’s idea of using folk resources.

IMSLP has a page for him with lots of compositions.

Also, here is a clearer reference to where I first found Taylor’s music. “Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora” Vol 3 Early Advanced Compiled and Edited by William H. Chapman Nyaho. The link is to the Oxford University Press page for this volume. There are other volumes in this series and I will probably look in to acquiring them after I finish exploring this volume. I think I purchased Volume 3 from Craig Cramer’s list of used music for sale he emails out.

Here’s a video of the piece I have played. Or at least an interp of it. This player changes it which is fine by me. Note that in comments is one by Sir Taylor, Taylor’s great grandson: Zachius Matthew Coleridge Taylor.

For a closer reading of Taylor’s 1905 score listen to this video.

Interesting comments on this video on YouTube as well. Apparently the performer knows the editor of the series alluded to above. Cool. I do think I prefer her interp to the jazzed up version, but maybe that’s because I’m interested in learning more about Samuel Coleridge Taylor.

Noteflight – Online Music Notation Software

Inevitable I guess. I have bookmarked to check it out. I’m curious about how well  the playing into notation works.

How Trump Is Transforming Rural America | The New Yorker

Bookmarked to read.

Esperanza Spalding Will Record ‘Exposure’ in Front of the World – The New York Times

I think Spalding is an unadorned genius.

On Arcade Fire’s ‘Everything Now,’ Pop Can Reach Deep and Be a Distraction – The New York Times

I have music from this album queued up on YouTube right now. This bookmark to help me remember to listen to it something.

Ticking Watch. Boat Engine. Slowness. The Secrets of the ‘Dunkirk’ Score. – The New York Times

My brother seemed to be taken with this new movie. He also remarked on the music. It sounds interesting.

Eileen left this morning to drive to Whitehall to take her Mom to a doctor’s appointment. After she left, I went to the Farmers Market and then Meijer. Earlier I had lain in bed and read the poetry of Derek Walcott on my ereader. I found an interview of him and discovered that I could highlight and send sections to myself in an email.  I am digging deeper into his poetry. Yesterday while Eileen and I relaxed at the beach, I read poetry by him.

I also read in Oilio by Tyehimba Jess. I am loving how he rewrites specific Dreamsongs by John Berryman. It’s very clever as well as moving to me. When we got home my copy of Olio had arrived in the mail. Woo hoo!

I was delighted when I turned to Don Saliers’s July 2017 column in the AGO mag. It’s called “Who needs poetry?” He makes a case for the need for poetry. He quotes from Jane Hirshfield’s Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. “Poetry,” she writes, “when we give ourselves to it, becomes within us a playable organ of perception, sounding out its own forms of knowledge and forms of discovery…. Seeing through poetry’s eyes, hearing through poetry’s ears, we come to know ourselves less tempered, more free than we were, and connected to … a larger world.”

Hirshfield’s book is sitting on the shelves at the local library. I will be picking it up later today no doubt.

Lest  you think that I’m only dabbling in poetry these days, here’s a composer who is new to me: Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912). He is a British born composer who did many settings related to the African American experience.

Not Samuel Tayler Coleridge the poet.

I was playing through an interesting collection yesterday before going to the beach: “Piano Music of Africa and the African Diaspora”  Volume 3 Early Advanced. I ran across a setting by Samuel Coleridge Taylor of “Deep River.” What the heck is this, I wondered? It was copyright 1905 by Oliver Ditson. It was clearly written, not exactly nostalgic but not modern that’s for sure.

I want to write more about this, but the internet is craaawwwwling and I’m losing patience. More another time.

I have been thinking how unfair the challenges are that face women in our society. And I have been thinking about it on a fairly personal basis, reexamining my own behavior in the light of understanding just how big the obstacles are to living as a woman. Eileen says that every woman (every!) has faced inappropriate behavior from min her lifetime. The more I think about this, the more it amazes me. This underlying situation colors so many interactions we have together as people. As I watch and interact with women I realize that they have to approach me with a certain amount of scrutiny out of self protection. Whether this is being alone with an elderly woman in an elevator at my Mom’s nursing home or passing a woman on the street and waiting for her to say hi first.

I used to sing Bob Dylan’s song, “Just like a woman.” But I don’t any more.

I can only hear the condescension in the lyrics. On the other hand,  I find myself still thinking of his line from “It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry”: “I wanna be your lover, baby, I don’t wanna be your boss.”

When I taught Music Appreciation I remember dismissing historical composers like Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. But I have changed my mind about these women, especially Fanny, by studying their music and understanding them a bit better contextually.

As far as living women composers, I have had a better attitude I think, supporting composers whose work I admire regardless of how they fit into categories.

Reexamining my behavior and attempting to improve my self awareness interests me. At the same time, I realize that racism and sexism is baked into each and every one of us. Our first impressions when measured show that in the first second or so of perception we classify each other by race and gender.  But I think that how we deal with that inside ourselves is critical.

Freidman used to point out that the space between perception and action is one that needs to be expanded to allow one to react more sanely.

Not that I’m any good at all this, but I’m trying.

I finished Omeros by Derek Walcott this morning. I am sold on his abilities as a master poet. I checked out  It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism 2016 edition by Thomas Mann and Norm Orenstein.

Mann and Orenstein self identify as beltway insiders, having begun working as “congressional fellows” in 1969 and then “immersing themselves in American politics” from there for forty five years. They are sympathetic, but see a need for reform.

Originally published in 2012 in response to the 2011 budget debate, Mann and Orenstein maintain that we as a country moved into new territory when several Republican congressman voted against a budget they themselves proposed in order to block Obama from getting credit.

Then and now they identify two sources of dysfunction in our government. The first is that virulence in government doesn’t work in the checks and balances of our constitutional system. In the Parliamentary system it may work but “Parliamentary-style parties in a separation-of-powers government are a formula for willful obstruction and policy avoidance.”

Secondly, they identify the polarization as fundamentally asymmetric: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

They point out that this imbalance is fundamentally unrecognized by “political analysis and discourse” of the media and the political class.

The book is a blow by blow analysis of the 2011 debacle from the inside, very much one of those books that describes how congress and the executive does and does not function.

I am finding it helpful, but it is wonky.

So. Yesterday was a whirlwind for me. I slept poorly on Saturday night. Eileen and I walked to the morning church service. I am thinking I need to get there earlier and do more playing because the last two Sundays I have felt a bit blurry. Fortunately, I didn’t commit the major faux pas of the previous Sunday.

I am still pondering how yesterday went. Last night I was mostly thinking like a freshman and replaying my mistakes. I didn’t nail the organ pieces the way I wanted to. But with a dash of willed perspective I could see that both the church service and recital went very well.

But it wasn’t until this morning that I realized how complimentary people were to me all day. I just didn’t hear it. I’ll write more about it, I’m sure. But for today my task is once again to try to relax and gain as much perspective as I can.

Poetry helps.

Eileen is at an Alto Breakfast. I have tasks today for the silly concert tomorrow. I am planning to write questions to ask the players in tomorrow’s program and then email them to them so they won’t be caught off guard. I basically have clear ideas about what I want to ask but have to put it into sentences.

I also want to post the program on Fakebook as well the poster for the next Grace Notes 2017 recital.

 Here’s the embedded version.

This doesn’t work very well. It changed the margins.  I will have to mess with it later before putting it up on Fakebook.

Here’s Rhonda’s poster.

I still have to figure out how to get these on Fakebook. But that’s later today.

I’m trying to understand my current mild stress. I am functioning well. That’s the language I used with Rev Jen this week. But something is a bit off. My motivation is practically nil. Today I will spend all the time necessary to prepare for tomorrow. I will practice. Eileen and I will run through the organ demonstrator, “Hiker’s Gear.” We have gone through it a couple of times. Eileen is rocking on this. I will do the Fakebook tasks. I will post the hymns. All of this falls under the rubric of discipline but not delight, duty not delight.

On the other hand I have been enjoying my reading. I ordered real copies of two books today: Olio O by Tyehimba Jess and A Detroit Anthology edited by Anna Clark.

The opening essay in the latter, We Love Detroit, Even If You Don’t by Aaron Foley, is quite charming. At one point, he writes “… guess what? We all live somewhere that’s fucked up to some degree” and this really hit me. Holland has its own “fucked up” nature. Hope College is as much a detriment as an asset to the community in my opinion. And the class nature of the locals is entrenched.

I don’t think I wrote about this here, but at our anniversary meal at Boatwerkes Waterfront restaurant we were denies window seats.  We were seated right across from the waitress station and just outside our window was the waitress station for the extensive outdoor seating. All of the seating at the front of the restaurant with the nice view were empty. We were there early, of course. Their policy is they don’t have reservations. But they do reserve choice seating for their “winter customers.” This was according to the Maitre D. I made up my mind not to ruin our meal by pointing any of this out to Eileen. But later we told each other that we had noticed that when we left there were still seats available. We could have been seated and none of the “winter customers” would have been denied a view.

I wondered if the fact that I was in a t shirt and shorts had anything to do with this treatment. I have noticed that there is a definitely a local culture that keeps people on the outside. That’s pretty “fucked up,” right?

I don’t mean to complain. It’s that big a deal. But it’s helpful to read a Detroit author reminding me that though I live in a safer neighborhood here than we did when we lived in Detroit, we have not escaped a local “fucked up” scene, just traded it for a different brand. I do remember when first moved here I was taken aback at all the white people. It’s a bit better now. But I don’t think I’ve cracked the local code other than to realize there is one.

A Broader Sweep – The New York Times

This was weird to read because the reporters followed an ICE team throughout areas where my son and his fam live: Riverside, Corona. It seemed somehow a bit more real to me for that reason.

This morning I was reading the first essay in A Detroit Anthology edited by Anna Clark. The author, Aaron Foley, used one of those twitter abbreviations that I usually have to look up: TL;DR. Too long; Didn’t read. I like the semicolon in that. It occurred to me that I often write my disjointed essays here that are TL;DR even though I keep an eye on the word count and shoot for around 500 words in an entry.

It’s been a weird week. I have been thinking about retirement. My morale has been oddly low. Everything is going well. But I have been more glum than not. I can ascribe it to needing more time off. Also my ring finger on my right hand has been giving me trouble. It sort of locks up. It may be that eventually this is why I have to quit my church job. I think that will be easier for my boss to accept than just that I’m tired of it.

If my finger problems persist I will have to contact the hand guy again. Unfortunately, it’s my understanding that if surgery is the only way to address this it comes with a high risk of loss of function. I would rather not risk that, quit my job and continue to be able to play my piano (harpsichord?) and compose. I don’t think I would have problems finding things to do with my time that’s for sure.

But why in the world is this on my mind when I have a new beautiful instrument and a dream boss?

Eileen and I spent some time sitting by the channel at the State Park yesterday. I made up some tomato sandwiches and celery cream cheese sticks for myself. We stopped at Subway for Eileen to grab something. It was relaxing. I got some reading in. I’m on page 64/227 of Olio  by Tyehimba Jess and loving it. It turns out that he hasn’t made anybody up, only fictionalized some fascinating people. Plus the poetry is excellent. He is a real craftsman.

I have proposed that Eileen and I do something this afternoon, either a State Park repeat or go see a movie or something.

This morning we are working on a lengthy task list which includes stopping at Gordon’s to buy ingredients for gorp for Sunday’s recital. We plan to serve it afterwards. Eileen wants to buy two more fans for the house. My clip on sunglasses are still at the Sight Eye Clinic.

Our task list has some other stuff on it that we will probably put off until tomorrow.

I had planned to write a blog about the poetry I am reading. I wanted to talk about it some detail and was planning to make it clear that’s what kind of blog it was (that way, my fam could skip it reassured there was no family stuff in it).

But then my daughter called us from England on Google Hangouts. It was fun to talk to her and catch up and see Lucy live.

After that I went to church and practiced. Eileen and I are planning a beach trip today, so I needed to do that before we left.

Eileen is putting lawn chairs in the car. We will drop by Mom’s to say hi and then head off to the Sight Eye Clinic to pick up my clip on sunglasses for my new glasses then to the beach.

Anyway, the poetry I’m thinking about is Derek Walcott and new writer Tyehimba Jess. I am nearing the end of Walcott’s Omeros and am finding it amazing. In a recent section, Walcott is visited by Homer in the form of a statue. It’s kind of vague. But the point is that Homer provided inspiration and direction and consolation to Walcott for the very poem the reader is reading. It made me think how real great artists are to me. People like Bach, Brahms, and so on. They are as alive to me as Walcott’s Homer. And they are also as forbidding as statues to me sometime.

I checked out Olio by Tyehima Jess. I was looking at this poet before vacation and decided  to wait until afterwards to explore his work. Olio won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and I can now see why. It’s a complicated work which surveys and interprets African American life from Slavery through early Jazz it looks like from the poet of view of the music.

How could I not go for that? I am definitely going to own a real copy of this work. “Olio” is the name for a certain curtain in vaudeville and was used to refer to the second part of a minstrel show in which there was a wide variety of acts. It’s also a word for “hodge podge” and a Spanish recipe.

The first section of the book introduces The Fisk Jubilee singers (a group I am very interested in) as sort of a chorus. Then comes a(fictionalized?)  letter from a Pullman porter to W. E. B. Dubois about Scott Joplin’s last days. I am definitely hooked. I’m taking it with me to the beach.

This is art from the book. I think it might be by Jess himself. Sorry if there are typos in this blog because I’m not proofing.

Sunday afternoon I went on Fakebook to find a stream of a local concert. Three people I respect were playing: Jordan VanHemert, Bill Bier, and Rhonda Edgington.

I had told one of them, Jordan, that I planned not to attend. He mentioned the live stream to me. I couldn’t find the stream. I did however find the program which Bill had put up. I looked at it. I noticed that they were only planning to do two movements of the Franck violin sonata transcribed for sax which is what led me to skip this recital. Franck just didn’t interested me. I couldn’t see it as a wise choice for a recital.

But after glancing over the program on Bill’s Fakebook page,  I became very interested. Eileen and jumped in the car and rushed over.

We started late. They were having technical difficulties getting the recording started. This was an interesting recital, but I have a few criticisms. Let me say that I am getting more and more eccentric about how I think about public performances of music. I think the old etiquette of weird silence, sort of holding one’s breath out of awe at the performers or the music, needs to be reconsidered.

I was interested in the Barefoot dances for two saxes, but Bill and Jordan said nothing about them. There were pauses and it seemed to me that Bill especially was feeling nervous. Consequently it was a bit uncomfortable to listen past that. I felt sympathy for him. He is a high school music teacher and a terrific saxophone player, a rarity.  I relate a little bit to being a non-college academic. He was Jordan’s high school sax teacher. So that’s pretty neat now that Jordan is ABD on a doctorate. They play well together. Bill and his fam are members of Grace but they live in Hudsonville and I rarely see them.

The Franck was a bit of a surprise for me. I plan to talk to Jordan about it tomorrow when we have a meeting scheduled. But it occurred to me that recasting a stuffy 19th century violin sonata for the beautiful expressive sound of the sax actually breathes new life into the music. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Who knew?

I like the rest of the program as well. The Nagao was quite beautiful and well played. Here is a video of them playing it  which you can sample if you’re interested. It begins around 5:22. This is a video of the second half of the concert.

I found it quite interesting that by the time they got to the last piece Bill and Jordan were much more themselves on stage. Rhonda has a very relaxed stage presence, I think the whole recital would have benefited from tall of them rapping with audience and joking around.  I know these three people. They play music with heart and understanding which is a rarity.  I hope the etiquette evolves in the 21st century to be a bit more user friendly and less formal.

It took the man who recorded the concert a while to realize that he was recording sideways. He put up the first part on Fakebook that way. Here it is, if you’re curious.

They had good program notes.

But I am increasingly convinced that musicians need to let listeners into the music by actually talking with them in the concert. We are all Leonard Bernstein these days.

A Cleanup of ‘Holes in the Wall’ in China’s Capital – The New York Times

Eileen said that she notice the “clean up” last time she was in Beijing. The visit before that she and I stayed in a lovely little place in a hutong.

Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know. – The New York Times

Real life mystery.

The Trumpet stop is right next to the Tremulant top on my new organ. Yesterday morning I had registered my prelude with a beautiful soft 16′ flute stop to accompany the Dulcian on a tenor solo by Marchand. I reached for the Tremulant but unbeknownst to me I pulled the Trumpet out. So instead of a beautiful set-up for the solo, I had a big fanfare chord. I proceeded to improvise a bit for about four or five measures, brought it to a nice cadence, stopped, switched to the Tremulant and proceeded.

But this wasn’t the only “oops” yesterday. When I began the introduction to the first hymn, the tremulant was still on. Oy. I managed to get it off after a couple of phrases.

At the psalm, I pulled out the psalm I had worked through right before service. I began the introduction. I noticed that the composer of the tone was Thomas Tallis not John Goss as it should have been. I began the first verse and realized that I was doing last week’s psalm. Oops. I stopped and told the congregation that I had the wrong bulletin (true). “Excuse me,” I said and left the room to get a correct bulletin.

While I was in the other room, Jen had them laughing. I think she said that I covered for her so often that now she could cover for me.  I returned, said “Sorry about that” and away we went with the right psalm.

The hardest thing I had to do this morning was accompany the hymn “God is working his purpose out” sung to the tune in the Hymnal 1940. The entire thing is one long canon between the soprano and the bass line. This is even the way it’s written in the pew edition of the hymnal. I had two settings ready. One for a weak singing congregation, one for a stronger. Of course, this morning’s group was a bit of a puzzle. They were singing, but it felt like they needed more organ behind them, so I chose to the first setting.

This hymn was on my mind when I did the wrong psalm.

Also,  in my defense  (defending me from me), I did some composing yesterday morning before walking to church. This is an entirely different state of mind for me from performing. So I was a little blurry.

Of course, my friend and fabulous saxophonist, Jordan VanHemert, was there with his girlfriend. And after church one of the two men whom i didn’t recognize and were the only ones besides me to stand during the prayers of the people came up and was introduced to me by a Hope prof as a friend of Martin Pasi.

Actually, it was nice to have these people there. I like having aware musicians in the congregation.

The friend of Pasi was Paul Roy. He serves as organist at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington State. We had a nice chat. I asked him to sign the guest book and come back and practice (since he was on vacation).

So I’m feeling a bit glum today. I think part of getting my groove back is also becoming more attuned to what is happening inside me. Yesterday after talking with Dr. Birky in our biweekly session, I realized that I felt better. I didn’t come away with new insights or goals or anything. I just think it helped to be listened to.

I have been spending time with Beethoven on the piano. I have read through almost all of his piano sonatas at one time or another. I know the first volume better than the second. Lately, I have been working through sonatas in the second and finding it rewarding.

In his J. S. Bach: a life in music, Peter Williams comments about François Couperin’s later work in an aside referring in aside to  “The falling-off of musical quality and originallity in Couperin’s later books. As with Beethoven I have been reading my way through all Couperin’s Ordres (groupings of pieces). I am near the end and find myself disagreeing with PW’s assessment.

I have been keeping Philippe Beausant’s book on Couperin by my synth and consulting it’s meticulous information about each dang piece. I don’t think he would agree with Peter Williams either.

Today I finished translating the first section of Plato in chapter 7 of my Greek. I have been using an app on my tablet to supplement my study. It’s the difference between a glossary (which my texts provide) and a dictionary.

I do own a Liddell and Scott dictionary which is the standard Ancient Greek reference book.

But the print is very small in it. The Android Greek app gives the Latin equivalent and citations of different usages in the literature.

This is helpful and was helpful this morning when I was struggling to understand how the text had arrived at its translation.

Wednesday was very busy for me this week. It was Eileen’s birthday. We went to the Farmers Market in the pouring rain which was exhilarating and fun. I do love the rain. From there we drove to the church to meet Mary Catherine Levri, music director for The Atheneum of Ohio, Mount St. Mary’s Seminary, Cincinnati.

She and her seminary are looking at a organ purchase and are considering a Pasi. I was surprised how well I connected with this person since the Roman Catholic situation is moving so far to the right. But Mary Catherine was very practical and interesting to talk to. It was helpful that Eileen was there for that meeting. After chatting for an hour or so, we left Mary Catherine at the organ to mess around a bit with it.

Home for lunch and boggle, then I went back for a meeting with Rev Jen. We worked a great deal on Grace Notes 2017 and 2018. It was a fruitful meeting. This whole process of monthly recitals is still on the runway as far as organization and projection of concerts into the future.

After that I practiced until Rhonda showed up to use the instrument (I was expecting her). I prevailed on her to review what Jen and I had put on the wipe board in the choir room. Rhonda had some good ideas and comments. Very helpful.

After that it was home to get Eileen, go see Mom, and then off to a Birthday Date night at Eileen’s favorite restaurant, El Rancho.

On Thursday, I did not have piano trio rehearsals or lessons. I decided to make this week another week of coasting and recreating. I had a dentist appointment in the morning but after that I mostly goofed off. I did spend some time practicing organ but that’s going to have be a daily activity for the next week due to the upcoming concert.

So. I skipped blogging on Wednesday and Greek yesterday. Today I have already worked a bit on the Greek and am obviously doing this blog. I’m thinking of sharing yesterday’s blog on Fakebook. I think my ideas are important. No feedback here yet. I might get some there.

So. I just did that.

2 ideas

1.in person communication

Ir’a not clear to me exactly what the science is, but it has been evident to me that the lack of affect in online communication creates all kinds of falsity. At first I was aware of confirmation bias, that we see what we disagree with more quickly than that which represents our understanding.

But this is a smaller insight for me than remembering how complicated and subtle human communication is. This real human interaction is impossible to duplicate via computer screens. And it is important. I think it’s essential to how we live as people.

In the second volume of Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy the wizard Ged points out to high priestess of the Nameless Ones that they are only able to defeat them by being together as people. This relational moment is presented as an defense against bad stuff.

I have more thoughts on this but need to get this blog done.

2. secondly

I was thinking about how badly people are behaving these days online, in social media and comments and crazy shit in general. Then I began thinking how in my life, I have known an overwhelming majority of people who exhibit traits I admire: genuineness, generosity, lovingness. There are few people I have met that I had difficulty seeing their redeeming qualities even as I could clearly see their flaws.

I know this is “anecdotal” nevertheless I think it represents a second authentic truth that is eroded online: it is a small percentage of people who are duds, assholes, and haters. Most of us just fuck up occasionally. Only now we do it in a public forum that is recorded.

Again it creates a false sense of who we are.

Today is a work day.  I sent in the info for this Sunday for the bulletin. This was made a heckuva lot easier by the cancellation of our summer outside Eucharist. I wasn’t sure how I would pull it off. Apparently neither were several parishioners who recommended waiting until we had the logistics better under control. cool.

Then I emailed the participants in the upcoming Grace Notes Recital.

You’ll notice this lovely poster designed by my daughter, Sarah, has the wrong title for this concert. I didn’t notice until after I had emailed a copy of it to the players and to the entire AGO Holland Chapter.

My AGO chapter sends out emails with BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). I mentioned this to Rhonda and asked if I could get the list. But that never happened. Today I sat down and entered all the members of the local chapter into a contact list. Actually, Gmail used to have contact lists. Now it has you “tag” everyone. Unfortunately, when I pulled up the list I had made about half of the emails weren’t there even though I had meticulously entered them.

Stupid stupid gmail only added the names that were on my contact list. The people whose names I put in that were not on the stupid stupid contact list didn’t come up under the tag. Very clever. I just put the fuckers in by hand.

And then I emailed every one a wrong poster.

By the time I got around to making a Facebooger page of this event on the Grace Notes 2017 page, I noticed the typo.

It’s very likely that I gave my daughter the wrong title for the concert (sorry, Sarah). I emailed her and asked her to change it. She has a lot on her plate these days so I am grateful for any work she does for me on this stuff.

Then I renewed my AGO membership which expired at the first of this month. This is pure laziness on my part, since my church pays for it. I have to pay it and get reimbursed, but still.

Rhonda texted me and asked if she could practice on the Pasi this morning, so that’s where she is right now. I went over yesterday morning and had fun playing around. Again I played through the Eb Bach organ trio (first movement). I have a bad habit these days of not being able to just read something on the keyboard. I instantly lapse into rehearsal techniques regardless of the imminence of actually playing for people. I have been practicing Beeethoven on the piano. There’s not much chance I will perform one of these lovely pieces in public soon, but still I find myself breaking down pieces with techniques like one hand at a time. I guess it’s satisfying because I’m not murdering as much music as I used to.

Eileen texted me that she was planning to leave by 9 AM this morning from Grayling. That puts her here around noon. I have missed her.

what jupe is reading

I have been getting quite a bit of reading in.  I’m on page 95/146 of Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan.

Le Guin does not disappoint. I am enjoying this, but it’s not exactly escape reading since Le Quin has some ideas she is working out as well as telling a story. Very cool.

Both my brother and Brooke Gladstone say that Robinson is a well known Sci fi writer. I must be out of the game because I didn’t recognize his name. I’m reading Sixty Days and Counting. I’m on page 105/588. Robinson is big on climate change. This book is about a new president facing imminent climate change. It happens now. And according to what I have been reading lately, we are in the midst of dire changes that are happening and becoming more and more difficult to reverse. Nice.

Anyway, Robinson tells a good story. I’m not sure where it’s going yet. So far it’s about the president’s first 60 days (hence the title).

I’m on page 279/325 of Omeros by Derek Walcott. This dude is real find for me. He has written a ton of stuff. I’m planning to reread Omeros but it’s nice knowing there’s other works by him I can read as well.

I skipped going back to church and practicing last night. I’m still attempting to “recreate” my way back to some sort of equilibrium.

Instead I went to the grocery store and came home and read.

The group at Eucharist was a bit tentative.

I persisted in my usual seduction mode, not playing too soft or too loud. The prelude was lovely if I do say so myself. The setting of “I heard the voice of Jesus say” used the melody twice. The second time it was soloed in the tenor voice. I used the simple 8 foot principal sound and it was luscious. As usual it was unclear to me if people are listening when I am playing solo organ. They talked loudly during the postlude, but then also there was applause when I finished it.

I continue to ponder my own delight in simply playing music in the vicinity of other people.

On the walk home, I was thinking about Bach and his attitude towards his music. I read recently that it’s a mistake to read back onto Bach a more modern sense of religiosity and piety. At the time, the Lutheran faith was the water in which Bach swam. It colored everything he did and did this in a subtle matter of fact way.

So when Bach writes “To God Alone be the Glory” (Soli Deo Gloria) on his manuscripts, the modern sense of celebrity and idealizing and practically worshiping a musician is miles away. I know a colleague who quit playing postludes because he didn’t think people were listening to them. And of course musicians and listeners are always complaining that people aren’t quiet during music.

For my part, I find doing the music so satisfying that when I am successful in drawing inside it and not being distracted that rudeness or obliviousness in people around me falls into the same category of being invisible. People don’t ignore each other consciously.

During Jen’s sermon yesterday, I could hear two men talking loudly in the coffee area. Later they returned to the room. They were leaders in our community. It could be that there was a pressing reason for them to be out of the room and talking loudly. However, I am skeptical. And if the leaders of the community are so rude to Jen, how in the world can I expect them to enter into the beauty of music.

Of course I continue to leave that door open. And many do seem to connect to the music at church. I felt a growing sense in this particular group yesterday of taking responsibility for their part.

By the time we got to the Fraction Chant, I took a chance and left it unaccompanied. The response was quiet but it was there.

Once again: for me music is something one does, it’s a verb. Maybe it’s like cooking for me. I love to cook. I love the doing of it. Serving others what I have made is satisfying, of course, but that’s not what I love. I love the making.

I’ll leave you with another video. I have been playing this sonata lately. Slower than this dude. I especially like the slow theme at 11:06.

I listened to this music as I blogged this morning. I think it’s amazing.

My ring finger on my right hand locked up yesterday in my second rehearsal session at the organ. I say rehearsal, but I did a lot of playing, that is, not rehearsing pieces but playing through them for the fun of it. This morning it seems okay. I had hoped that if I lived through my old age, my hands would allow me to continue to play keyboard. This is often the case with keyboard players as opposed to instruments where need your mouth and teeth for embouchures like trumpet (which I played for a while).

I am watching my hands age. But yesterday was the first time I felt as though I was impeded from playing. Bummer.

I do a lot of playing in the course of a day. Often at the organ my work is directed at upcoming performances at church. But it is such fun to play through pieces on the Pasi. Yesterday I returned to the Bach organ trio sonatas. I have been falling out of love with them even as I learned them. I have learned and performed many of them. They are basic organ literature. But on a crappy organ they seemed to me to be a bit esoteric and not as attractive as much of Bach’s other organ pieces.

But yesterday the E flat came to life on the Pasi. What fun! I can see how what I call “organistas” come to being. I find myself drawn to music that I suspect might have limited appeal to the average listener. This “average listener” is important to me, because that’s also how I see myself. But at the same time I am drawn into nerdy music stuff like history, musicology, historical interpretation.

It’s ironic that I have been thinking so much about French classical music. It doesn’t have the surface profundity of German Baroque. In fact, it is often playful especially in the harpsichord stuff. But at the same time, to perform it requires special attention to historical understandings of how it was played when it was composed.

Bach and his German contemporaries were highly interested and influenced in what was happening musically in other countries. Bach owned copies of music by many French composers. But interestingly we don’t know how he performed them. Neither are we sure how to interpret Bach’s own music when it shows obvious French influences.

I go back and forth about interpreting some of Bach’s music the way I understand where to buy valium in thailand French Baroque to be played. This is mostly about playing the straight rhythms differently than written. My teacher, Ray Ferguson, taught me many French Classical pieces on harpsichord and organ. It helps to return, as I did yesterday, to some of these pieces. Ray had a tendency to mark my music. So I see in his handwriting his suggestions about unequal playing of straight notes, fingers, added ornaments and slides. It is delightful.

Yesterday I spent some time with an Offertoire from Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes. It is a long piece. Too long for church. But Ray and worked over it thoroughly. I’m not sure if I performed it in an undergrad recital. But I’m sure I played it for class. I do like the music. And it sounds cool on the Pasi.

I actually started listening to Kyung-Wha Chung’s Decca recording of the Bach on vinyl this morning, but it started skipping so I looked up the piece on YouTube. After listening to Hilary Hahn’s version, I found Chung’s on YouTube. Here’s the first movement, which I think she plays marvelously.

At the G-20, Beethoven is played and the world listened (maybe) – LA Times

Wow. I missed spending time with Beethoven’s piano sonatas recently on vacation. Since coming home I find myself sitting down and playing through movements. It seems that the only one who convinced the author of this piece they were interested in the music was Macron from France who happens to be a classical pianists.

 DuckDuckGo

You probably know about this search engine. At the cabin I chatted with Tony (Ben’s husband) about security and cyber geek stuff. He is a programmer and it’s interesting to hear him talk. I also put Reddit on my tablet. Tony uses it a lot. I seem to use it a bit after I see him.