Category: Music and Poetry

Death and Taxes and Procrastination

A podcast I listened to recently considered the ways that procrastination benefited creative thought.  I might have called it “marinating” instead, but the process is the same.  Flickering ideas come and go, never quite landing, but somehow manage to grow in scope during these periods of procrastination.

As I said, procrastination works well for creative problem-solving.  Not a good idea for your taxes, unless you plan to get creative with those, and impossible with death of course. One of the things I had procrastinated on was writing a post about planning your funeral. Following the death of my well-loved 95 year old father-in-law, that seemed like a great idea, but it never jelled. You should go ahead and plan it anyway though!

I’ve enjoyed the discipline of writing for a blog (nearly) every week for the past 12 years,  but am feeling a need to step away for a while. Not from writing, just from this format.  People in different parts of my life keep telling me to write a book, and while a book might not emerge, I have most definitely procrastinated taking this idea seriously and am hereby committing to write with more intention, if perhaps less purpose. The other night I awoke from a dream that was telling me something important, and for the first time I took the leap of writing down an idea that was percolating up from deep within during the middle of the night. My beautiful blue suede-covered journal stays nearer to me these days, and what looks like nonsense on the page at the moment just might be transfigured.

We’ll see what comes of it, but I’m giving myself six months to explore things that might have been marinating for years now.

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Here are some of the things that have been feeding my imagination these days:

Upcoming concerts:

  • Sunday, March 1 at 2:30 – a program with Furia Flamenco.  Very fun!
  • Saturday, March 7 at 7:00 – a house concert with Karin Kelleher playing sonatas for piano and violin by Grieg and Beethoven, raising money for Manna Food Bank.  Contact me if you are interested in attending. (and another one on April 18)
  • Tuesday, March 24 at 12:10 – bassoonist Cindy Gady and I are putting together a program of meditative music to accompany walking the labyrinth at Church of the Epiphany. Read more.
  • Not a concert, but a chance to make music with a wonderful group of singers in residence at St. David’s Cathedral in Wales during August

And books…so many great books are part of my life.  At the moment I have three books in rotation:  a second reading of The Overstory by Richard Powers, listening to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and then this week I had to add Philip Kennicott’s new memoir, Counterpoint, after hearing him speak about it. His book explores family, playing the piano, Bach and The Goldberg Variations. Except for the abusive mother part, it’s the book I would have so wished I could write.

There is much that is ugly about our world right now, and while that has probably always been true, the ugliness seems more pervasive, more oppressive than I can remember. What Vuong manages to do in his extended letter to his mother – which reads more as a poem – is to see beauty in between and around all the pain he experiences.  I don’t know if being able to describe the sordid, heartbreaking parts of life with such glorious waves of prose worthy of someone named Ocean works to deny what should be harrowing to read, but the books and music and people I turn to again and again are not an escape into beauty, but rather have clarifying and redemptive powers for me as I wade through all those thoughts that I’ve procrastinated writing about.  After I get our taxes done, and before I die.

Check in with me in six months and we’ll see if creativity does indeed emerge from procrastination.  Until then, peace, my friends.

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Seven

I am preparing a choral piece, new to me and to the choir I’m working with for a few months, and as so often happens, my free-associating mind began with a question that led me to a host of unexpected places. Jonathan Dove’s 1995 work, Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars is as mysterious and gorgeous as the night sky. The music alone is enough for me, but I had to ponder the text. Seven stars? The question asked, and I was abruptly dropping down Alice’s rabbit hole, going past all kinds of strange sights associated with the number seven.

It began innocently enough with a quick search of the Pleiades, the seven stars that represent messengers of God in the second chapter of the Bible’s Book of Revelations, and the inspiration for part of Dove’s text. Suddenly my brain was careening past Joseph’s seven years of famine and seven years of plenty, the seven joys of Mary and the seven last words of Jesus, baseball’s seventh inning stretch, marriage’s seven year itch, and the seven colors of the rainbow (remember Roy G. Biv?). Seven days of creation, and seven musical pitches in western music – do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. But wait, there are also seven pitches in the scales of Indian classical music: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni SA. Seven chakras in Hinduism’s Vedic texts to guide our bodies’ spiritual, physical and emotional health. Seven years to regenerate every cell in the human body. Seven deadly sins, seven gifts of the spirit.

I was feeling quite dizzy at this point.

Alice’s rabbit hole seemed to end, and I found myself where I had begun. The seven stars known as Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, and Dove’s beautiful piece:

But then I slipped just a bit further, remembering that the one group of stars nearly everyone can identify is the Big Dipper, outlined – do I need to say it? – by seven stars, including Polaris, the North Star.  Follow the Drinking Gourd, a spiritual which gave coded directions to escaping slaves, pointed the way north with its advice to follow that dipper/gourd to freedom. That is the power of seven.

Apparently my trip down this rabbit hole wasn’t quite finished yet. I came upon an a cappella group that is new to me called Naturally 7, and they too demonstrate the power of seven, with their voices creating an orchestra of sounds, and a message in this particular song that still needs to be heard about tearing down walls and finding another kind of freedom.

Seven, a prime number which represents the unity of 1 and the diversity of 7, indivisible by anything else. Seven lamps on the menorah, our weeks made complete by seven sunrises and sunsets, seven stars to guide us on our way.

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If you’re interested, the choir of Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland will be singing Dove’s piece during their 10:30 am service on February 2.

it was terribly cold

That’s the title of one movement from David Lang’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical work, the little match girl passion, which will be performed next Tuesday by The Bridge Ensemble on Church of the Epiphany’s noontime concert series. All are welcome and it’s free, but don’t expect to leave emotionally unspent.

The lower case letters are the composer’s and, in fact, a 2017 New York Times article asked in its title: where have classical music’s uppercase letters gone?  My favorite line, by the way, is the first sentence of the second paragraph: “But composers who channel their inner E.E. Cummings…”  Very funny.

Lang explains that he began using lowercase titles as a student, too full of self-doubt and too sure that “classical music is about nobility, about things with capital letters that are big marble busts on pedestals.” He didn’t feel worthy of writing in capital letters – that was for Beethoven, in his mind – but he also saw an intimacy and an invitation to experience his music from the inside by using lowercase titles.

Lang does more than break stylistic rules for the written word. He breaks through the Christian narrative of suffering, taking Jesus out of the story and putting in a character from Hans Christian Anderson’s story. The little match girl passion not only invites us in, but breaks our hearts too. That’s what happens when you allow yourself to witness suffering from the inside.

It was terribly cold outside, and the girl’s cruel father sends her out to sell matches. Her futile efforts lead her to seek refuge under a Christmas tree, and she lights her matches and sees vision of her grandmother, the only person who was ever kind to her. As in Christianity’s passion narrative, she is derided by strangers and left to die. The composer summed up the story’s message, and his work’s appeal across sacred/secular lines: the “message is pretty simple: you need to pay attention to the suffering of people around you.”

The music is at once archaic and universal, the story juxtaposes the horror of her reality and the beauty of her hopeful visions. You are invited in to witness these things in the performance, and to contribute as you’re able to The Welcome Table ministry of feeding the homeless which is sponsored by Church of the Epiphany. It is perhaps one small way to pay attention to the suffering of those right around us.

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Tuesday, January 28 at 12:10 pm
Church of the Epiphany, 1317 G Street, NW  (Metro Center)

20/20 Vision

I was heartened to read in the December 3, 2019 edition of The Washington Post that the world isn’t actually as terrible as we all seem to believe.  The editorialist looked at the many ways that people are actually better off now than they have been before. Starvation-level poverty reduced by 80% since 1970, massive gains in disease prevention,and billions of people living with the freedoms that democracy promises and more prosperous than ever before.  Read it for yourself: The world is doing much better than the bad news makes us think.  And don’t we all need some good news? ¹

I could have looked at a dozen (or more) other places in the same newspaper to find articles which point to a very different interpretation of current life,  with stories about gun violence, environmental degradation, and evidence of racism and hatred  and corruption of every kind. Which version of the world is true? ²

It comes down to a choice of living with hope, or living with hopelessness. The first suggests we avert our gaze from the bleak realities all around us and the second is just, well, depressing. If the goal is to do something, however small, to make the world better, than which of these attitudes – hopefulness or hopelessness – will spur us to action? It’s well-known that depression causes inaction, an inability to move forward or cope with life’s challenges. So that leaves hopefulness, but what to do with this chosen hope? ³

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
(from an essay by Wendall Berry, Poetry and Marriage)

I have this idea that poems, like art, can’t be sought after.  They seem come into my life when I’m not looking. Berry’s words above aren’t a poem exactly, but they did come unbidden into my life at just the right time several years ago, read by a yoga instructor at the end of class. They give us permission to live comfortably in bafflement, to accept uncertainty, to find hope, and maybe even joy, in those things which block us from the easy paths we think we want.

The year ahead promises all of those – bafflement, uncertainty, and hope too. It is Berry’s last line which makes me smile though. High on my list of favorite sounds is water moving through a rocky creek, but I had never thought about the creek’s music coming from the stony impediments along its path. Perhaps your 20/20 vision will see more clearly through the looming 2020 clouds if you sing more. It’s worth a try.

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¹ Yes
² Both
³ I don’t know, but singing will help

More Lessons from Beethoven

True to form, I am out of synch with the rest of the world. Musicians are gearing up for a major Beethoven celebration in 2020, the 250th anniversary of his birth, so plan on hearing a lot of Beethoven’s music next year. Meanwhile, here I am – a step ahead, or just out of step? I think Beethoven would approve.

Alongside the “Archduke” Trio, which I wrote about last week, I am also getting reacquainted with Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata, the Piano Sonata Op. 53, a very popular work from the middle years of his creative output which I haven’t played in  40 years or so! Like the “Archduke” Trio, Beethoven has dedicated this music to a nobleman, Count von Waldstein. Beethoven so wanted to be a “von” – i.e. a member of the nobility, but a single letter doomed him to be a humble Dutch “van” without any hint of noble blood. We have that in common at least.

The “Waldstein” Sonata is part of a program that I am playing for my mother and the other residents of her retirement community. It’s a small gift I can give to the person who gave me a life of music by filling our home with the music she loved – everything from Harry Belafonte to the Mamas and Papas to Mozart. She got to choose anything she wanted for my program…and the Beethoven Sonata is joined by music of Philip Glass, and a piece by Albeniz that really should be on the guitar instead of the piano, and a sweet little piece that she loves more than anything, “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” that is supposedly from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, with a little Chopin and Liszt thrown in for good measure. My mother has dementia, and her world seems to be shrinking more each time I see her, but music keeps us connected, at least in the moment.

Beethoven performed as a pianist for the last time when he played the premiere of his “Archduke” Trio in 1814. I wonder if he knew then that it would be his final concert as a pianist.  How often do we do something with the knowledge that it is the last time? There are happy finalities – like making a last mortgage payment – but mostly I think we would be pretty sad to know we are having a final experience of something integral to our lives. When will it be the last time that my mom knows who I am?

As Beethoven’s deafness worsened, it may have appeared that his world got smaller and smaller, but in that isolated universe he went on to create great expanses of music which pushed the boundaries of tonality and form. It wasn’t a limited experience at all inside his head, it would seem.  Even as I am shut out of the life I shared with my mother, perhaps there is a richness of sounds and experiences inside her isolated world that are unknown by those on the outside. I hope so.

I learn a lot about myself when I play Beethoven. He wears his heart, and his frustration, on his sleeve – or so it seems when I hear his music. Expressing emotions in creatively productive ways is certainly one lesson to be gained. And too, his music seems to contain everything that the beautiful reading from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes teaches us about the span of a lifetime. That there is a time to be sad and a time to be joyful. A time to be serious and another to be silly. Times to be in control of our feelings and others when we should be unabashedly exuberant. Times to sing and times to be silent, times to dance and times to be still.

 

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Lessons from Beethoven

There’s always a place – a few notes or measures – in any piece I’ve encountered by Beethoven that is just impossible.  Beethoven’s music is always difficult to play well, but hard work usually pays off and something musical emerges, with his abrupt mood swings propelling the music at every turn. Except for that one spot…sometimes the fingers find all the right keys, and sometimes they don’t, and no amount of practice guarantees success 100% of the time.  That’s just how it is, for me anyway.

Beethoven came raging – he never ambles – back into my life a few weeks ago with two works that I needed to learn for two different concerts. First up, his so-called “Archduke” Trio, Op. 97. Piano, violin, and cello open the first movement with quiet grace and charm, but there it is, just a little over one minute in – the spot. The one I practice and practice without guarantee that it will go well in performance. I’ll work hard, drill into the spot’s difficulties with slow practice and careful attention to fingering….and in the moment will just hope for the stars to align!

Perfection is all around us. Images and sounds are manipulated in the studio to create ideal versions of beauty and performances free of any mistakes. Maybe perfection is a worthy goal, I don’t know. But the drama of Beethoven’s music, with its interruptions and conflicts and surprises, requires a different approach in my opinion. One that is unhampered by perfection, accepting of messiness, that leans in to the surprises and embraces the interruptions, all the while wrestling with the conflicts.

Those are goals worth pursuing, musically and in every other part of our lives, don’t you think?

sonyafirst004Join me and my musical partners for our performance of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio on Tuesday, November 19 at 12:10 pm at Church of the Epiphany’s Tuesday Concert Series.  TCS concert flyer

Love is the Lesson

An Easter treat in the form of a beautiful work for choir by my friend Gary Davison. I asked him to write a piece in 2004 for an anniversary celebration and he set this text by Edmund Spenser, which ends with the simple petition – So let us love, dear love, like as we ought; Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught. As is so often the case, profundity lies in simplicity. And as human history has too often shown us, we aren’t very good at keeping things simple.

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English poet Edmund Spenser (1552/3-1599) was a contemporary of this week’s birthday boy, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), usually celebrated on April 23 or 24. While Spenser seemed to work within Tudor political machinations, writing in praise of the Queen and to gain favor with the nobility, Shakespeare seems to be more of an outsider, quicker to cast a skeptical eye on the institutions of his time and the people who ran them. But that’s just my unscholarly summary of two of the English language’s greatest writers.

Spenser’s sonnet, and the whole liturgically-based cycle from which it comes, Amoretti, demonstrates his comfort with the Anglican church and its theology. Debates, on the other hand, about Shakespeare’s belief in God, his churchmanship or whatever else might be ascertained about his religious convictions, are less clear, especially considering his acknowledged role as one of the preeminent humanists of all time. Love was often the lesson, but for Shakespeare it was always an arduous one.

What I think has appealed to most of us during these past 400 years is Shakespeare’s ability to write about every aspect of human character – its many frailties, its potential for redemption and forgiveness, its capacity for love and sacrifice. Just as “there lives more faith in honest doubt” (Tennyson), I believe there lives more understanding of God in our evolving and ever-expanding awareness of God’s complicated creation known as humankind. Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare, for giving us so many windows into that perplexing creature, and happy birthday.

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This blog represents my attempt to put thoughts together on various things that seem to connect – in my mind anyway. More often than not new ideas first involve reaching back to what was and I can only hope that the prehistoric San cave painting at the top of this page inspires all kinds of connections between old and new.

Feel free to pass this message along to anyone who might be interested. You can simply subscribe (look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the post) to get a reminder of new posts, or you can register with a user name and password in order to comment. If a community conversation comes out of this, all the better. We have so much to share and so much for which we can be grateful.