Stephen Rumler the new music director for Grace Episcopal Church Holland where I used to work contacted me via Instant Messenger yesterday. He asked if I would agree to meet with him. I instantly texted him back that I would.

It interests me to look back on my life and see that it is a rare occasion when people seek me out as someone worth listening to. (Hi Rhonda!) Rumler’s self confessed mentor was Peter Kurdziel. Peter is one of the few people along with Rhonda who have thought that I was someone worth listening to. He and I planning a chat for this Thursday. I look forward to it.

Though I do look forward to meeting with both men it arouses in me doubts about what I have to offer them at this stage of life. I have lost interest in church and much church music. At the same time I am very interested in other kinds of music and ideas. But I am always good for a rambling chat.

In fact I miss chatting so much that I have been turning regularly to this blog to vent a bit. This spares my captive audience listeners (Eileen and my therapist, Dr. Birky). Plus making sentences seems to be both therapeutic and helpful.

I called my dermatologists office yesterday morning shortly after 8 AM. My rash is out of control. Despite this I manage to continue functioning but I am constantly uncomfortable. They scheduled me for mid November which is much better than the March appointment they gave me last time I called. I’m not expecting much help from this quarter since my previous diagnoses was inconclusive. But I think it’s worth a try.

Eileen is thinking that if the weather is good enough we might skip date day today so she can mow the lawn one last time before winter. She usually has brought in her plants by this time. My recovery from eye surgery prohibits me from lifting for another week or so. This has put a bit of a cramp in Eileen’s style. There is a huge bookcase which she purchased at auction sitting in the Subaru waiting to be brought in the house. Even opening the box in the car and bring it in piece by piece will probably not be sufficient for moving this without me because she is planning to replace several of the living room bookcases with this one, nicer looking shelf. This means not only setting it up but moving a ton of books around.

I was amused to read in Burgess’s This Man and Music that music is itself both apolitical and amoral. I even agreed with that back when I was a church musician.

Burgess begins by describing the 19th century conviction that there was “no doubt of the moral content of the great instrumental works,” specifically the works of Beethoven. He was thought to be the “sublime custodian of ultimate values.” This point of view persisted into the 20th century says Burgess.

“The trouble began with the Nazis,” he writes, “who, being Germans, had more right to Beethoven than anybody, and who found in his work precisely those values discovered by an earlier age of humanists. The commandant of an extermination camp could spend the day supervising the consignment of Jews to the ovens, and then go home to weep tears of pure joy at the divine revelations of sonata or symphony—his flaxen chubby daughter at the keyboard, the fine record-player which was due of his rank.”

Burgess continues, “It was always nonsense to proclaim that Beethoven’s music was about the brotherhood of man, Jew and Gentile, or mystical union with the god of the liberals. If fascists and democrats found, as they did, the same matter for exaltation, then music cannot be about morality.”

Amen says Jupe.

Radicalized at the Workhouse – Inez Bordeaux – Inquest

My daughter Elizabeth “shared” this link on Facebook. It’s quite a read.

Essay: Should We Have War Crime Trials? – The New York Times

This past Sunday’s NYT Book review was one of those retrospective issues which featured excerpts and essays from the past 125 years. This essay by Neil Sheehan from 1971 is good but long.

I have been playing the piano pieces of C.P.E. Bach. I own two Dover collections of them and the later, better three volume edition edited by Eiji Hashimoto.

Despite owning these five volumes, I am not clear about how the keyboard works of C.P.E. Bach are organized. The Groves Dictionary of Music tells me that he wrote over 1,000 separate works over a period of 60 years. Despite saying that his keyboard compositions are “at the heart of his creative work,” unlike Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and others it’s not easy for me to understand what he was doing in these pieces. I have played all five volumes through at least once. I can see the glimmers of the impending Classical interest in formal aspects of the piece. Not to mention C. P. E.’s facile ability to make interesting and beautiful music.

C. P. E. stands between the baroque of his father’s music and the music of Haydn and Mozart. Groves says that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven held his music in high esteem but that there is no substantiated evidence of this. Haydn and Beethoven are known to have used his book, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments as young men. When an English newspaper reported there was tension between C. P. E. and Haydn, he demurred and was quoted that “It is my belief that every master has his own true worth. Praise and blame can do nothing to alter it. The work alone allots praise or blame to the master, and I therefore take everyone as I find him.” Hamburgischer Unpartheyischer Correspondent, 20 September 1785, quoted in the Groves article on C. P. E.

All this arouses not only my admiration but my curiosity. Subsequently I have requested a biography of C.P.E. and a collection of his letters through the MelCat network. I look forward to learning more about him.

In the meantime I continue to re-read and ponder Christopher Small’s ideas in Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. I can see that he has been very formative in some of my more radical conclusions about music.

A trained classical musician himself, his career was basically a reminder that Western civilization and its musics are one of many.

“Most of the world’s musicians—and by that word I mean, here and throughout this book, not just professional musicians, not just those who make a living from singing or playing or composing, but anyone who sings or plays or composes—have no use for musical scores and do not treasure musical works but simply play and sing, drawing on remembered melodies and rhythms and on their own powers of invention within the strict order of tradition. “

In addition he points out that so called “classical music” is not even a dominant aspect of music in the current Western world. Writing in 1998 he says that “It appeals to only a very tiny minority of people, even within Western industrialized societies; classical music records account for only 3 percent of all record sales.”

I find that all of this puts my own musical life in a helpful perspective. I seem to have more in common with Small than most musicians I have rubbed shoulders with in my life especially including those in my academic training.

None of this diminishes my own love of making music and listening to it. If anything, it confirms it.