Aesthetics: St. Augustine and the training of beautiful artists

In De Musica, St. Augustine continues to refine his artistic theory in the tradition of Greek thought. Musical rhythm is related to the rhythm of the universe is related to the rhythm of the body is related to the rhythm of vegetables grown ad infinitum. The passages that are of particular difficulty to modern readers are the suggestions that the artistic process is not found solely in the manipulation of the materials of the medium. The artists needs to change him or herself. "The art is an active conformation of the mind of the artist." For St. Augustine, this means that the artist has to conform him/herself to the beautiful by moral discipline in order to create and reveal beauty. The artist has to become beautiful in order to create beauty.

Of course, he leaves a little bit of wiggle room for complicated problems. There are people who are not morally beautiful that create artistically beautiful works by utilizing the rhythms of eternal beauty. The artist that works in this way, however, will always attach too much value to their own work.

"We must not deny to rhythm...its inclusion within the works of the Divine fabrication, for such rhythm is within its own kind beautiful. But we must not love such rhythm as if it could make us blessed."

Art works may be beautiful, but they cannot make beautiful people. For St. Augustine, only God can do that.

All this is quite difficult to swallow when friends send us video of an artist creating a new work by drinking quantities of colored milk and vomiting it on to a canvas. Is there any room for this kind of thought when petulant human beings like Wagner can create some of the most beautiful music ever written? For that matter, how do we handle the case of the beautiful human being that makes mediocre art work?

The paradigm has shifted to the point where we only teach lessons in the manipulation of the material pertinent to our own artistic discipline. In the old world, they were much more ready to give advice on the shaping of the artists him/herself. I'm not exactly sure how a teacher can do that anymore. I do know that the truly great artists with whom I studied were unselfish and humble. That stuff was rarely communicated in lessons. It happened when we were eating or going to a play or something else.

I suppose all this is to say that those of us who are in the business of training young artists to master their materials also need to take seriously the obligation to mentor them as well. In spite of the rise of the modern academy, there is a very real sense in which the way we pass on our craft is through the old master-apprentice system. If all we do is teach them how to create without teaching them how to live, I'm afraid that we are not really living up to our calling as educators.

USC Chamber Singers: Go Tell It On the Mountain

So, the story of this piece is, I had this thing called the "little big band" at my church gig. I was writing charts for them. One Christmas, I wrote a chart for "Go Tell it on the Mountain". After we played it, I thought it would work as a choral piece. Here is an absolutely stunning performance by the USC Chamber Singers.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty

Last night, my dear friend Tinsley Silcox and I were texting about TTBB rep. It reminded me that I actually did write something for TTBB chorus other than the all too ubiquitous Manly Men's Chorus.

Here is the fabulous Gary Packwood conducting the Louisiana All State Men's Chorus. This is my setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty". I have placed images of the poet in the video and the text of the poem below. This piece hasn't received much attention, but I think it deserves some more performances.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

Aesthtics: St. Augustine and the beginning of the end of Plato

In De Ordine, St. Augustine seems to be under the full sway of Plotinus when it comes to the idea of artistic creation. He argues that you can get your soul “out of tune” by immoral actions.

“For to the soul that diligently considers the nature and the power of numbers, it will appear manifestly unfitting and most deplorable that it should write a rhythmic line and play the harp by virtue of this knowledge, and that its life and very self – which is the soul – should nevertheless follow a crooked path and, under the domination of lust, be out of tune by the clangor of shameful vices.”

So, we have some old world assumptions going on in this passage that need to be clarified a bit. Here they are.



1. The universe is a rational system
2. You get in tune with the universe by seeing its beauty and practicing “virtuous habits”
3. If you are “out of tune”, your art work won’t be beautiful (i.e. rational (i.e. in a balanced numeric ratio (i.e. moral))))
4. The process of creating art is not about “self exploration”, but is, in the old Pythagorean sense, a physical manifestation of the rational and invisible nature of the universe itself.
5. Once the “soul has properly adjusted and disposed itself, and has rendered itself harmonious and beautiful, the will it venture to see God, the very source of all truth…”
6. For St. Augustine, the terms beauty, rational, moral, and God are all very closely related.

Nothing in this is very distinctive when compared to Plato and Plotinus. The curious part happens in the conclusion. He says that once you see this beauty (by “living” “praying” and “studying well"), it won’t trouble you that “one man, desiring to have children has them not, while another man casts out his own offspring as being unduly numerous...one man hates children before they are born, and another man loves them after birth; or how it is not absurd that nothing will come to pass which is not with God…and nevertheless God is not petitioned in vain.”

It seems strange to conclude a chapter on aesthetics by talking about prayer. What is most interesting about this is that prayer becomes the focus of paradoxical thinking in Augustine’s theology. He explains his view a little more fully in book 5 of City of God.

“Now, against the sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done by us only because we will it.”

It seems to me that St. Augustine concludes the chapter in De Ordine by referring to prayer because for him, it is a mystical process that goes beyond the “impious darings of reason”. Ultimately, the irrational and mystical elements in St. Augustine’s thought will expand and bloom (after about a thousand years or so) to provide new models for discussing creative work. The crack in the Platonic armor will eventually expand wide enough for art to be considered something that reveals part of the self and not just a manifestation of the rationality of the universe.

Gigging stories: Wedding disaster

I always wanted a great wedding story. Every organist has a wedding story, and for years, I did not have one. When we gathered for our secret organist meetings to complain about brides requesting “It’s a small world after all” for a processional and grooms requesting the Texas A&M fight song for a recessional (I’ve actually had both of those requests), the stories came out. One organist could recount a bride passing out in mid-ceremony. Another would recount the time a nervous groom made it up to the altar only to violently vomit all over the floor. For many years, my best story was of a wedding where an eighty-five year old man married a fifty something woman. He was wealthy, and she was divorced. The only funny part of the story was me imitating the old man walking down the aisle. It was like watching Tim Conway as the old man on the Carol Burnett show. He walked so slowly that I had to play the Pachelbel canon about fifteen times. While cute, the story only managed to elicit a few chortles and guffaws next to the tales of weak-kneed brides and weak-stomached grooms. However, one day something unexpected happened: the fire marshal made an unannounced visit to inspect the Methodist Church where I worked at the time.

It turned out that the fire alarm system in the church was not up to code. A new system needed to be purchased and installed immediately. This was all managed quickly by a property committee. When the company finished the installation, they taught the pastor how to operate the system. While the property committee managed to move quickly on issues of fire safety, musical safety did not interest them as much. The “organ” was an electronic Allen that had been languishing in the corner of the chancel for some thirty years. It was the sort of jalopy that I normally characterize by saying, “It’s the P.O.F.S. 1000 model.” (If you are unfamiliar with that acronym, I will let you work it out for yourself.) Aside from being about as useful as my toaster for musical accompaniment, it boasted a special feature. When the power in the church would brown out for a moment, every “stop” on the organ would engage. On the old Allens, there is a set of push tabs that run horizontally above the keys that control the different sounds. When the power would flash, the push tabs that controlled the “stops” would depress by themselves from left to right like a set of cascading dominoes. This was loud enough in itself, but if you were unlucky enough to be playing at the time, the result could be cacophonous. The organ would let out a deafening electronic cry of despair that would fill the church. This was immediately followed by clacking sounds of the push tab dominoes.

The excitement of playing the Allen P.O.F.S. 1000 is enhanced by the fact that Tampa is one of the lightning capitals of the United States. With up to fifty lightning strikes per square mile in a year, power outages are a normal part of life for us in the rainy season. That was actually the main problem with the old fire alarm system in the church. If the power went out, the fire alarm system went out. We needed a new system that would engage in the case of a fire that burned through electrical wires. Much like the P.O.F.S. 1000, the new fire alarm had a special feature for lightning storms. It would automatically engage during a power fluctuation.

It was during one such stormy summer day that a couple came to by married at our congregation. It wasn’t the first marriage for either person, as I recall, so they wanted to have a rather small celebration. The pastor and I were handling the ceremony without the aid of an overly fussy wedding coordinator. The couple had invited about fifty guests. The processional went off without a hitch. They moved up to the chancel. When it came time to bless the rings, the pastor took them and held them for all to see. He began his prayer.

There are some scrumptious moments in life that you shouldn’t miss without savoring each morsel. There is the moment between the end of a piece and when the conductor lowers his or her baton. There is the moment when the needle is on the smooth part of the record before the next song starts. There is also the moment when the lightning strikes between “In the name of the Father, and the Son” and the “and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

It seems uncanny how moment may attach to moment in a continuous monogamy during periods of boredom and unpleasant activity. Moments seem to congregate in curved asymptotic lines that never quite touch the vertices of reality as they stretch toward infinity. I once wasted what seemed to be three years of my life listening to a poor public speaker eulogizing someone at a funeral gig. He combined James Joyce’s stream of consciousness style with an obsession for irrelevant detail. He packed fifteen seconds of thought into thirty-five minutes of panegyric. People whose favorite word is “and” seem to be able to execute a metaphysical miracle by transforming a moment into a lifetime.

It seems equally supernormal when moments slip by so quickly that the clock’s secondhand looks like it’s on steroids. A deadline approaches, and one wonders what happened to all the moments that seemed to be piling up around your feet when the eulogy was taking place.
When the lightning struck, a moment sauntered by at a slow pace, but it was chock full-o-events. The slowness of the passing moment was balanced by the rapid succession of sensory information hurling toward the chancel. In a few short seconds, I had a wedding story to tell.
The pastor held up the rings to bless them. As the prayer was concluding, the Trinitarian blessing was interrupted. The pastor said, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son…” There was a bright flash of light as a lightning bolt struck right outside the nave of the church. An almost simultaneous, vociferous clap of thunder followed the lightning bolt. All the lights in the sanctuary vanished leaving the wedding party standing in darkness. The organ let out it’s agonizing electronic death throe cry and the push button tabs cascaded down. It was at this point that I first got to experience the special features of the new fire alarm. As our eyes adjusted to the dimmed light, a strobe light on the fire alarm began to flash. A voice that was at once authoritative and awkwardly mechanical began to blare out from a speaker box, “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING!” The alarm continued flashing the strobe light and repeating its warning at regular intervals. Taking advantage of one of the pauses in the mechanical voice, the pastor quickly inserted, “and of the Holy Spirit. Amen” only to be followed immediately by “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING!”

With so much happening between the “Son” and the “and the Holy Spirit”, the momentary flood of sound and strobe light created a little pool of stillness. The happy bride and groom were disoriented and looked to the pastor for some kind of guidance.

The silence was broken by the return of the lights inside the sanctuary. All breathed a sigh of relief that was quickly re-inhaled when a booming mechanical voice said “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING!” The pastor made a feeble attempt to continue the service. “In token and pledge,” he said. “In token and pledge,” repeated the groom. “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST EXIT THE BUILDING!” “Uh…look. I’m really sorry about this,” the pastor said apologetically. “We just had a new fire alarm installed, and I am the only one that knows how to operate the system. Just wait a second.” With that simple explanation, he left the bride, groom, wedding party, organist, and congregation. The pastor walked from the chancel through one of the back doors and left the sanctuary heading toward the church office. We all sat staring at each other in silence only to be regularly interrupted by the “ATTENTION! ATTENTION!” Some nervous laughter began to emerge here and there amongst the pews, but the overall mood was strangely somber. “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! YOU MUST” and the voice was cut off in mid-imperative. The pastor walked back in, stood before the couple, and said, “I’m really sorry about that. In token and pledge…”

I’ve often wondered if that couple remained married. It can’t be a good omen for your wedding when a mechanical voice keeps telling you to “get out while you still can.”

Gigging stories: Buxtehude's ugly daughter

In the late seventeenth century, there was a fantastic musician named Dietrich Buxtehude. He landed a sweet gig as music director in the city of Lübeck.. He could play the organ so well that people flocked from all over Germany to hear his concerts on Sunday afternoons. Even old Bach himself (when he was young) got permission for a study leave and walked several hundred miles to hear Buxtehude play. The concerts were so exciting that Bach accidentally forgot to go back to work for four months. When the time was right, Buxtehude began to look for a successor so that he could retire. There was one problem. He wanted to make sure that his daughter would have some kind of financial security after he retired. Organist salaries have not improved that much since the late seventeenth century, so his pension would not be enough to sustain her. She needed to be married.

Back in the day, the way you picked up a good gig was by apprenticing with a master. You would fulfill some of his duties and do on the job training until he retired or died. Then, you became the master. It was also not uncommon for the apprentice to marry the masters’ daughter. Buxtehude had married his predecessor’s daughter. He decided that the best coarse of action would be to link the two items together.

So, when someone showed up to audition, Buxtehude would pull the applicant aside and say, “This is a really sweet gig. Lübeck is a great town. The congregation is very supportive. The organ is fantastic. Oh, by the way, if you want the job, you have to marry my daughter.” For many, this didn’t seem too unreasonable until they took the local tour. It turned out that Buxtehude had a big, ugly, German daughter. Soon after the applicants would meet her, they would gracefully withdraw their applications. Even Handel and Mattheson thought that marrying the daughter was too high a price to pay. Apparently, when sacrificing for your art, there are certain sacrifices that are too costly. I propose we call it the Anna Margareta Buxtehude Barrier (or AMBB).

Here is my best transcription of a conversation that I had with a choir member that left my ensemble without explanation. It’s the closest I ever came to the AMBB. I was unknowingly in the role of Anna Margareta. I showed up for a gig as a sub at a church about a week after I was fired for supposedly killing a rabbit (you can read about that here), and found her singing in the choir. She was about 15 to 20 years older than me.

“Hi, it’s nice to see you again.”
“Nice to see you too.”
“You sort of left the ensemble at church 6 months ago without explanation.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m glad you found a new place for yourself. You know I'm not there anymore.”
“I heard..…I can tell you why I left, but it’s kind of personal.”
“OK.”
“Well, you just started making me really uncomfortable.”
“Really?! I’m so sorry. How did I do that?”
“Well, I just started feeling like you were making advances toward me.”
“Like…romantic advances?!”
“Yes.”
“How…I mean, what did I do that gave you that impression.”
“Well, you know how you started asking me to meet you at the church in the evenings?”
“Um, no.”
“Yes. You started asking me to meet you at the church late at night.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about. When did I do that?”
“You were asking me to meet you on Sunday nights late in the evening.”
“Wait, are you talking about choir rehearsal for the ensemble?”
“Yes.”
“But, that was a rehearsal. There were other people there. We were all rehearsing.”
“Well, it was in the evening, and you were asking me to meet you at the church.”
“WITH OTHER PEOPLE! It was a rehearsal.”

“Well, I just thought it was kind of weird that you were asking me to meet you at the church at night.”
“But it wasn’t just you. It was a rehearsal.”
“I know, but I just felt like you were making romantic advances, and it made me uncomfortable. So, I had to leave.”
“Um…OK. I’m glad you found a place where you are more comfortable. Do they rehearse in the evenings here?”
“Yes, but it’s different because the director is a woman.”
“I see. Well, I’m sorry if you felt that way.”

At this point, I exited as gracefully as possible. I know that as soon as I start apologizing for how she felt that the conversation wasn't going to continue well. Conversations with delusional people are usually fun, but this one came a little too close to the AMBB. I quickly switched my part to the role of Handel and quietly withdrew.

SPACE improv for Advent

One of the great places of peace and enjoyment in my life is our Wednesday night service at St. Mark's on the Campus. It's filled with incense, candles, and lots of silence. We sing Gregorian chant and say old prayers in new ways. The service usually starts with Jonah Sirota and I improvising together. Here was last night's prelude on Veni, veni, Emmanuel.



To see more of our improvisations, go to our Facebook page and like us.

Gigging Stories: Adventures with Pate - part 2 Smokey Robinson

(If you missed part 1, you can read it here.)

I didn’t see Pate for a few years until I received a phone call for an industrial show in Naples. “Hey Jenn,” I said. “I just booked a gig in Naples to play with Smokey Robinson.”
“Really?!!!” she gasped.
“Yeah. Who’s Smokey Robinson? I know he’s somebody.”
“You don’t know who Smokey Robinson is?!”

That is actually the beginning of many of the conversations that Jenn and I have about music. I contend that she is the worse off for not being familiar with the Beethoven Seventh or the Arvo Pärt Te Deum. She accuses me of being ignorant of the basic building blocks of American culture. This time, she was very interested in what I was doing because she wanted to go to the gig. Jennifer loves Motown. Over the next few weeks, I managed to find a recording of a Smokey Robinson. The crosswalk guard on the way to Zach’s school told me that I needed to hear “Tears of a Clown” and “I Second that Emotion.” My favorite was none of them. I didn’t like Motown because I never really understood it. My lack of understanding, however, wasn’t going to stop me from playing the gig.

We drove to the Ritz Carlton in Naples and began to unload gear. Jennifer came posing as my roadie. There was an afternoon rehearsal. I waited outside the room with a gaggle of string players that had been hired from Orlando. As I stood there, Pate came strolling around the corner carrying his gear. I was glad to see a familiar face on a gig in a strange town.
“Hey, Pate.” I said. “I haven’t played with you since the incident with the union guy.”

Smokey’s rhythm section traveled on the bus with Smokey. His music director played piano. There were a couple of guitarist, a bass player, some vocalists, and a drummer in the band. Only the music director would be attending our afternoon rehearsal. They were supplementing the band with eight string players, me on back-up keyboards, and Pate on saxophone. An “industrial gig” is when an insurance company, or financial firm, or some other conglomeration of rich white men want to be entertained at the end of their convention before heading off to a hotel room for a tryst with one of their co-workers. It has become increasingly common for companies to hire performers (that were once more well known than they are now) and pay them exorbitant sums for a brief show. While we waited for the rehearsal to begin, the string players asked if we had worked with Smokey’s music director before. When Pate and I responded negatively, they tried to prepare us. In my entire musical life, I have never experienced a more torturous and unproductive rehearsal.

He walked into the room with his ego draped around him like a large winter coat. He was truly impressed with himself, and he had an utter disdain for all of us. He set up a drum machine on a table, and the string players sat in chairs directly in front of him. Pate was off to the right, and he placed me facing the rest of the musicians immediately next to the drum machine. His ego-coat brushed up against me throughout the rehearsal. Rehearsing without a rhythm section to provide context for your part is like an unattractive person hitting on you at a party. You can tell that there is a way to handle the whole thing gracefully, but the words just don’t seem to come out right.

For non-musicians, it is like someone giving you the words “go … and … spread … out … on … a … table” with a stopwatch. After handing you a piece of paper that read, “You need to say these words at 3.5, 4.1, 4.2, 5.7, 6.0, and 6.1 seconds.” He would say, “It will all make sense later.” Next, he would proceed to yell at you for two hours about your pronunciation and timing problems. Finally, you would be brought together with another person with a corresponding list of words and times. When you put the two lists together it would say, “Let us go then, you and I/when the evening is spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized on a table.” “Aha!,” you say. “It all makes sense now. That seemed to mean something totally different when I practiced by myself for two hours.”

Rehearsing with Smokey’s music director was just like that. The first thing he said to me was, “I don’t want you to use your left hand at all. It gets too muddy with the bass player.” At the time he said that to me, I had just finished twenty years of practicing several hours a day to learn to play the piano with both hands. None of my teachers had ever emphasized the “leave out the left hand technique” or the stile senza mano sinestra as we would say in classical circles. Out of twenty years habit, I occasionally reached up and played a note with my left hand. The director had, what musicians call, “huge ears.” He could hear everything. A single note played with the left hand would result in stoppage of the rehearsal.
“How many times do I have to tell you not to play with your left hand? I’ve told you several times already! Don’t do it!” he would scream.

After being berated several times in front of the other musicians, I gave up and literally sat on my left hand to keep it from wandering up to the keys. When it came to playing some of the solo passages that he had written for me, things fell apart, the center didn’t hold, and he turned me in a widening gyre. If I missed a single sixteenth note rhythm when I sight read a passage for the first time, he would stop the rehearsal, look at me and say, “That’s a sixteenth note! Can’t you even play a sixteenth note?! Here. It goes like this.” Then, he would push me off of the keyboard and play the passage the correct way and demand that I get it right. This went on for two hours with one brief respite where he went over to yell at a violin player. By the end of the rehearsal, I was upset and had a headache. If I remembered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle correctly, I knew that my dignity was either near my left hand’s resting spot or on Pluto.

We had a short break. Pate came up to me and said, “I’ve seen this once before. I was playing for Steve Allen one time, and he rode a piano player’s ass through an entire rehearsal in front of everyone.” We had a brief sound check. Pate and I were in the back on a raised platform on stage left. The strings were in the back on stage right. The rhythm section and backup vocals were spread across the stage in front of us. As the sound check ended, one of the tech guys approached Pate and I and asked for our full names. He wrote them down on a scrap of paper. “I wonder what that’s about?” I thought. While people ate dinner, Pate and I, along with a bass player and drummer from Orlando, played standards. Then, we took the stage and got ready to play with Smokey. Up to this point, we hadn’t seen him.

The groove started at the director’s count, and my headache vanished. Smokey took the stage and I saw his little countertenor behind swaying back and forth as he sang. He was in great voice, but the main memory I have is of his backside. I was behind him for the entire performance and only saw his face once or twice. The second song was called, and I had an epiphany. Motown strolled to the back part of the stage wearing a slinky black dress. Her hips moved with the comfortableness that pretty girls always have about themselves. I saw those voluptuous breasts that had nourished so many and the sad look she always has in her eyes. I understood for the first time. We danced together for the rest of the night. Jenn had been trying to introduce me to this sultry lady for so many years, and at that moment, I finally understood. The thing was, I had to meet her in person. The radio reports didn’t do it for me.

Pate and I had a book of charts. The rhythm section had a set list taped to the floor. When the third song came up, Pate and I both had “Being with You” up in our books. That was not the third song on the floor chart. “Being with You” starts off with a saxophone solo. I considered playing. I considered telling Pate that there was a discrepancy between our books and the set list. I chose in the end to wait and see what happened. The rhythm section started playing and Pate blared out the solo of “Being with You”. Pate was playing with all the vigor and volume of a professional soloist. Unfortunately, it was not the same song that the rest of the band was playing. The bassist immediately turned around in tandem with the rhythm guitar player and hushed Pate after two measures.

I believe it was fortunate in some senses because I learned a lot about Pate in that moment. Pate was not just a saxophone-case-throwing-witty-instrumentalist. Pate was and is a performing artist that understood the high calling of that vocation. Performing artists don’t get to make their mistakes in the privacy of the painter’s studio. When a performing artist messes up, they get their pants pulled down in front of hundreds of people. It is a high-risk job, and it is not for the weak. In the film Mr. Saturday Night, Billy Crystal tells his brother that he never had a performing career because he only had “living room balls.” That is, he only had the courage to make a mistake in front of his family. Pate has balls that drag on the ground behind him when he walks.

The song ended, and the bassist turned to Pate and said, “Now you play it.” Like everything else from the rehearsal in the afternoon, it sounded wonderful in context. In the middle of the song, Pate had his big solo of the night. The stage lights dimmed, and a bright spot came up five feet from me and illuminated Pate as he began to play. The dancing butt turned around, and I saw Smokey Robinson looking slightly older than the picture on the album that I had. He was fumbling around in his pocket for something while the spotlight was focused on Pate. Pate continued wailing away, this time on the right song. Smokey, to my astonishment, pulled the little scrap of paper out of his pocket on which the tech guy had written our names. Pate was playing so well that I started to feel some chills. As he finished his solo, the lights came up a little on Smokey. With the spotlight still relentlessly blinding Pate, Smokey knelt down and pointed at Pate. When you travel and hire musicians to supplement the band, you never know exactly what you are going to get. After hearing Pate play, Smokey’s voice rose with excitement from his kneeling position as he screamed out to the audience, “KURT KNECHT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!!! KURT KNECHT ON THE SAXOPHONE!!!!”

I wasn’t sure what to do. I couldn’t rightly stop the show and correct Smokey Robinson. I took the only course of action that seemed open to me at the time. As soon as “Being with You” was finished, I leaned over to Pate and said, “Pate, I promise I won’t mess up my solo. That way when you get introduced as the keyboard player, the audience will clap just as loud for you.” When the time was right, the spotlight came up on me, and I executed the solo without error. Afterward, Smokey very kindly corrected the earlier mistake and announced me as the keyboard player and Pate as the one who actually took the saxophone solo. Despite all the nasty comments from the music director, the rhythm section came up to Pate and I after the show and said, “We play with a lot of guys in a lot of cities. You two are the best we’ve played with in a long while.” My dignity made the return journey from Pluto, and I packed it up with my gear and drove home.

About a year later, I was in a thin place in the world. There is a county park not far from where I used to live, and if you walk far enough out on some of the trails, the universe begins to get slippery and smooth. On this occasion, I was about a mile and a half out in an area where a hardwood hammock and a pine flatwood were having a territorial battle. It is wonderfully lonely spot. I was quite at peace until I heard a strange sound coming from the underbrush. It seemed too large for any of the animals that I knew about in the park. The sound continued to grow in intensity. Being that far out in the woods, I couldn’t imagine anything smaller than a bear crashing through the forest. As my fear increased, I began contemplating what my life accomplishments were. I imagined a eulogy where the words, “until his life was tragically cut short by that wild beast in the Florida forest” were used. Suddenly, Pate came crashing through the bushes and trees on a bicycle. My immediate thought was to go down on one knee, point at him, and say, “KURT KNECHT LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!! KURT KNECHT ON THE BICYCLE!!” I refrained and said, “Hey Pate. What are you doing out here riding a bike around in the middle of the woods.”
“Oh,” said Pate, “I’ve gotten into biking lately.”
“I haven’t seen you since the Smokey Robinson gig.”
We made some more small talk and parted.

There is something strange about musical relationships. Pate is not someone that I would call a “close friend” exactly. That meeting in the woods was probably only the fifth or sixth time I had seen him in my life. However, I had shared intimate experiences with him through performing. There is a camaraderie that develops from going through meaningful experiences together. It is not the same sort of friendship that you develop with your work colleagues. The contact is much more limited, but the experiences are much more visceral. It is much more akin to family relations. You may only see that weird aunt once every two years, but there is something that you both share. There is a grandparent that you both love, and somehow, it makes you concerned about the same thing. Even if you don’t see them often and are not that interested in them, you are a family. That’s what Pate seems like to me. We care about life in the pit. We care about the same sultry lady.

Gigging Stories: Adventures with Pate - part 1

The ancient Celts talked about “thin places” in the world. The idea is that there are certain spots where the visible world and the invisible world have been rubbing against each other for so long that there is a sort of smooth spot in the fabric of the universe. Waves of the Spirit crash and grind against the shore of the material universe for so many years that the space-time continuum gets turned into sea glass. If you find a “thin spot”, the air will be thick with God, and it is easier to hear when you talk to each other.

When you play a show, you arrive at the hall and descend into the orchestra pit. The pit is one of the “thick places” in the universe. It is jagged around the edges, and though you can still hear God talking, the voice sounds like a recording from a wax cylinder. You can tell that there is magic flying off the stage and puncturing audience members, but it is all happening too far over your head. If, on a rare occasion, some of the “magic” accidentally drips down from a puddle that has been spilled on the stage, there is usually a trumpet player who wipes it up before someone slips on it. While the audience is slurping up stardust, the clarinet player is working a crossword puzzle. The lead actress may be “giving it their all” or “turning it on” (or insert whatever trite, hackneyed, overused Broadway cliché you want), but Mr. Violin II is reading a novel. Once, I saw a bass player play an entire gig with a portable TV and headphones. He watched a hockey game while playing the score for “Into the Woods” and never missed a musical entrance.

Single reed players tend to be the most mischievous. They are like Avolakatishvara, one of the many-armed avatars of Shiva. They can drop a clarinet to pick up a saxophone. While two hands play that instrument, a third is picking up a flute, and a fourth is turning a page. They can destroy worlds with a word. Single reed players, as part of their training, are required to memorize volumes of dirty alternative lyrics to every song in the repertoire. While you are concentrating on listening to the singer, listening to the bass player, watching the conductor, and guessing about whether the B in the upcoming measure is flat or natural, there is a single reed player singing softly in your ear, “Whatever Lola wants…” Some single reed players that I have encountered know lyrics that were passed down from previous generations. They can sing along with a Brahms Symphony using a text that will make you blush.

I believe that the highlight of all pit experiences happened one summer when I was playing for Ann Reinking’s Broadway Theatre Project. We put on a review show each summer after three weeks of rehearsal. Gregory Hines, Savingon Glover, Bebe Neuwirth, et al would come to work with the kids and talk to them. Tommy Tune would show up and tell them to “give it their all” or “one hundred and ten percent.” The show hadn’t come together very well that year, and we were rehearsing right up to the point when the house opened.

Pate, who is a virtuoso saxophonist, was the single reed player on the gig. Pate plays like someone packing a small suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes. After jumping up and down on top of the bag to smash every article inside, he opens it again a few minutes later and notes explode all over the room. Pate also has a personality like a minefield, so I always walk carefully around him. He’s actually wonderful to work with as long as you don’t hit one of the mines.
Many people don’t know that at certain performing arts centers, there exists a long running war between the union stagehands and the musicians. On this job, skirmishes started when we arrived to rehearse in the morning on the day of the show. I descended into the pit with the others, and prepared for a difficult rehearsal. I started pushing the piano to adjust it according to the specific spacing needs of our ensemble.

A stagehand immediately rushed to downstage left and yelled at me, “Don’t move the piano!”
“Well, we need it over a few feet.”
“You can’t move the piano. You’re not covered by insurance.”
“Well, can you move the piano for us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not the piano mover. I only move chairs.”
“Well, can you get the piano mover to come down and move the piano for us?”
“I’ll call him.”

Too many minutes later, a gentleman strolled down the stairs and walked along the cement wall that defines the hallway under the stage. He climbed up to the pit. He began to traverse the instruments and cases that blocked his way to the piano. He took a bad step and kicked one of Pate’s landmines. Actually, he kicked Pate’s saxophone case with some degree of force. Instead of apologizing, he quipped, “If you guys wouldn’t leave your damned cases around, I wouldn’t kick them.” Pate erupted like a well-shaken beer. With the prowess of an Olympic discus athlete, he grabbed the empty case, hurled it twenty feet through the air at which point it met up with the concrete wall in the hallway. The hard plastic of the case greeted the concrete and then bounced along the floor before coming to rest. The noise was as loud as a percussionist who had just been in a fight with his girlfriend. The crash of the case against the wall resounded throughout the hallway, the pit, and the entire hall causing everyone present to momentarily freeze. “That’s exactly what I would have done with it,” grunted the piano mover. He then scooted the piano over two feet and returned to the world above the pit.

We practiced for a few hours, and the union steward called a break. After fifteen minutes, we returned from our brief forage into the world above down to our little purgatory betwixt stage and audience for a final hour of rehearsing. I opened my book, looked across and noticed that Pate was missing. “Where’s Pate?!” the conductor demanded of me.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t with him.” I replied.

She proceeded to ask each member of the band about when Pate was last seen. Despite our best efforts, Pate’s whereabouts remained enshrouded in mystery when we began to rehearse. We made it through one tune, and band members started speculating that Pate and the union piano mover had decided to continue their discussion about pit etiquette in an environment more suitable for physical contact. The second tune went by and the conductor began to burn with fury. Actually, she was the type of person that I often encounter in the musical world. Because of her complete inadequacies in the field that she had chosen, her emotions were at constant low boil. She lacked respect from the professional musicians. It was something that she earned by means of her musical deficiencies. The slightest fanning of the flames made anger bubbles run up to the surface. We started the third tune, and with Pate still absent, she began to seethe.

Pate walked in and sat down. The tune was quiet, and I was the only one playing. She stopped conducting while I followed the singer. Glaring at Pate, the conductor heatedly asked, “Where were you?!” she asked.
“Sorry,” said Pate. “I was in the bathroom.”
“For this entire time?!” she hissed.
“Yes.” said Pate, slowly. “You see, I found the union guy that unzips your pants, but I couldn’t find the one that aims for you.”
The laughter traveled through the pit so quickly that no one survived. People that were supposed to play missed their entrances, the drummer couldn’t keep a steady beat, and I couldn’t see the music because laughter caused tears in my eyes. Even the furious conductor laughed so hard that she couldn’t really punish Pate. The song limped on haphazardly until the director had to stop it for lack of accompaniment. Pate had won the day, but he wasn’t asked to return the next year. Before many years had passed, I chose to express my opinion about the music director, and I too was invited not to return. Pate and I, however, had an adventure or two still to come on future gigs.

9-11 Memorial Music

Here's the link to hear my 9-11 Memorial Music commissioned by David Matthews for Dr. James Bass and the USF Chamber Singers.

LINK

My first concern when writing music in memoriam for 9/11 was the profiteering that went on by composers after the tragedy. It seemed like everyone was putting out 9/11 pieces. I knew that to do the project, I would need to find a text that was universal enough to apply to all tragic situations. With my love for all things Medieval, I went on a hunt a found the 9th century liturgical drama "Ordo Rachelis" which I believe was written by Notker the Stutterer. I've set the first two sections of the play. I did not use any of the original chant. Below is the translation by Hoppin, but I've included my own copyright free translation in the score.

I. (This movement is Rachel's words)
Alas! tender youths, what mangled limbs we see!
Alas! sweet children, murdered by madness alone!
Alas! whom neither piety nor your age restrained!
Alas! wretched mothers, who are forced to see this!
Alas! what now shall we do?
Why do we not submit to these deeds?
Alas! because joys cannot lighten our sorrows,
we are mindful of the sweet pledges of love who are no more.

II. (The consolers respond)
Do not, pure Rachel, do not sweetest mother, hold back the tears of your grief for the murder of the little ones.
But if you are sad about these things, rejoice at what you weep for; assuredly your children live blessed above the stars.

I designed the movements so that they could be performed as a set or as separate pieces. The first movement is in what I might call a Neo-Franco-Flemish style. I think it's very beautiful. Maybe it's the kind of music Josquin would have written if he had been through the wringer of modernism. The second movement is more dramatic and is accompanied by a challenging but playable piano part. I think it is equally beautiful. Though the styles are slightly different, I did use a cyclic harmonic progression to unify them.