Kurt Knecht

Gigging stories: how I became a composer

2012-03-08T20:15:00.003-06:00

Part of my prize in the Florida Orchestra’s Young Artist Competition was the opportunity to perform the third movement of the Ravel G major Piano Concerto three times with the Orchestra. We were to play two “Coffee Concerts” and one evening concert. Each concert was given in a different performing arts center in the tri-city area. Aside from the thrill of being a young performer playing with a professional orchestra, I had a handsome check in my bank account.

The “Coffee Concert” is something that has largely vanished from the concert scene. Budget cuts have necessitated the scaling back of orchestral performances. Back in the day, some orchestras had concerts that were not part of their masterworks series that happened in the mornings. The idea was that if you were going to listen to orchestra music in the morning, you needed some coffee first. The music for the “Coffee Concert” was the light and fluffy spinach omelette of the repertoire – because no one should have to suffer through Wagner before they are fully awake and cognizant of what is happening to them. It wasn’t a pops concert, but you also weren’t likely to hear Mahler.

The audience for the “Coffee Concert” was made up of two distinct castes. The minority faction was peopled with wealthy, aged ladies who like to spend money on the orchestra. Most of them didn't like music that much, but they liked the idea of liking music that much. The larger portion of the audience was drawn from the elementary school children who were bussed in for the furthering of their education. Principals, were encouraged by their music specialists to send the kids to the orchestra. The principals got a breather for a few hours as the violins sawed away at the children’s musical ignorance.

I waited in the wings that morning while the orchestra played Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. As I was listening, I reconsidered the morning concert. It was actually quite lovely to start the day by listening to a live performance of Ravel. I thought of the elementary school children in the audience. I remembered when I was bussed down to the theatre to hear The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra at that same age. I had managed to smuggle a McDonalds straw in my pocket. I chewed up my program bit by bit creating spitball munitions which the straw sent through the air towards students of other elementary schools as Peter was capturing the Wolf.

The Mother Goose Suite ended, and I prepared to take the stage during the applause.
One of the two stagehands delayed my entrance saying, “Wait a moment. We have to raise the piano.” I noticed as I glanced at the backstage monitor that the piano was positioned in the pit. The pit was in the lowered position, ten feet below the orchestra. I should have been alarmed immediately because the stagehands were the wrong type. The normal profile for a union stagehand is someone who found him/herself not quite talented enough to be in the spotlight. Not having the capacity to do, they become experts on how to do. They even seem to know more than the people that actually do and develop a pretentious attitude toward anyone who might slight them. They retain their connection to theatre life vicariously through operating the spotlight that they wish enshrouded their own body. They usually retain their artistic haircuts and black turtlenecks.

I have found that it is best to stroke their egos with some symbolic gesture when preparing for a concert. A public compliment will go a long way. Asking for permission or help for some detail of set-up can also work. If one of the tech people decides that they don’t like you, they can ruin a show. They will turn off your monitor so that you can’t hear. They will adjust your position and claim that the lights won’t reach you where you would like to be placed. The two stagehands at this coffee concert were clearly non-union. Instead of turtlenecks, they wore flannel shirts. Instead of the usual black pants, these two wore the creepy kind of polyester pants with the button that is slightly to the side. If they had made a previous attempt at a career in theatre, it would have had to occur more than sixty years before.

An uneasiness about their competence began to grow in my belly as they began to work toward getting me on the stage. One of the men fumbled in his pocket momentarily. He pulled out a small flashlight and turned one of the ends causing the bulb to shine. He walked over to a wall about ten feet away in a manner that stirred up childhood memories of watching Tim Conway playing the part of an old man on the Carol Burnett show. With his feet dragging, he inched his way ever closer to a box on the wall where his flashlight revealed two large buttons. I remember something awkward about the way he stretched out his thumb and mashed the top button. Instead of extending his arm, he used his waist as a fulcrum and bent his upper body to depress the circle labeled “up.” A dialogue between the two men began, and I had to reconsider if they had ever attempted a career in theatre. The lines sounded like something from a previously undiscovered Ionesco play.

The man with the flashlight turned toward his friend who was watching the monitor and asked, “Is the piano coming up?”
“No. It’s not coming up.”
“Is it coming up now?”
“No. It’s not coming up. Are you pushing the button?”
“Yes, I’m pushing the button. Is the piano coming up?”
“No. It’s not coming up. Are you sure your pushing the button?” 
“Yes, I’m pushing the button. Is it coming up?”
“No. It’s not coming up. I bet someone turned it off underneath.”
“Is it coming up now?”
“No. Are you pushing the button?”
“Yes, I’m pushing the button. I’ve got my thumb on it.”
“I bet that’s what happened. I bet someone turned it off underneath.”
“Is it coming up now?”
“No. It’s not coming up. Are you pushing the button?”
“Yes. You may be right. Someone could have turned it off underneath.”

While this interchange might have been amusing in the proper context, I was beginning to experience great anxiety as their conversation kept catching in the same groove. I was also reaching the conclusion that “someone had turned it off underneath” and that another “someone” should probably be called to “turn it on underneath.” This same conclusion, however, did not seem to occur to the non-union stagehands. Fortunately, the stage manager from the orchestra had reached a similar conclusion, and he appeared next to the monitor watcher and picked up a phone. While we waited for the apocalyptic piano to rise up from the pit, I turned my attention to the stage.

As the applause for Mother Goose withered, the conductor of the orchestra found himself in an awkward position. While stalling for time is part of the natural repertoire of musicians who play in clubs, orchestra conductors are on very unfamiliar terrain when traveling that particular path. He was walking across a dark room toward a light switch knowing that his toe was going to get stubbed.

“Um…OK…I, um, see that the piano isn’t up yet…um, well…I know we have some elementary schools with us here today…um, can we, maybe, bring up the house lights a little…and, um, what schools do we have here today?…Hi, yes…what school are you from?…Azalea Elementary, wonderful…and, OK, you…what school are you from?…The Nina Harris Exceptional Student Education Center, wonderful…and, what?…one of your students has a question…sure, what’s your question?” He seemed genuinely relieved that someone else was providing the material for filling dead space. “…will we play a song for you?…well, um…the orchestra is not generally in the habit of taking requests at our concerts.” Momentarily, it seemed that allowing others to provide stalling material had become a rather pyrrhic victory, but with the piano still in the pit, he had few options. “well, um…what song did you want to hear…really?…you know, the orchestra knows that song…let’s all stand.” He turned, the audience and orchestra stood, and they launched into the national anthem. It was as good a stalling song as any, and probably the only tune that all eighty members of the orchestra could play from memory together. By the time the bombs had burst in red air, the piano had made its sinister climb from the abyss. Now, clearly very relieved, the conductor easily said, “I see the piano is ready, and now we will bring out our First Prize winner from the young artist competition, Kurt Knecht.”

The Ravel G major is a piece that musicologist say is “jazz influenced writing.” It’s not the sort of jazz that we as Americans think of as jazz. It’s jazz that has been julienned and braised with pearl onions in cabernet sauvignon by a French chef. The buoyant rhythms and jaunty gait of the tune fly on incessantly as soon as the conductor fires the starting gun. Pianistically speaking, there are some passages that require the hands to be placed in very awkward overlapping positions. There are also scalar passages that can only be mastered by persons willing to play them for hours on end until they become as automatic as breathing. The final difficulty is maintaining coordination with eighty other people who are also tearing off virtuosic passages on their own instruments. Maintaining concentration can be extremely challenging. It was especially challenging on that morning because one of the orchestral soloists had played a solo passage one bar early. The premature entrance required all of us to ignore what we were hearing and steadfastly believe that the other seventy-nine of us were actually with the conductor. One confidently wrong musician can throw an entire ensemble to the ground.

As I bounced along through one of the more difficult passages, I heard something I had never heard at an orchestra concert before. There was clapping in the middle of the piece. I couldn’t be sure my ears were bearing true witness at first, but it continued. Someone was clapping along to the beat as I pulled sound out of the instrument by the sweat of my brow. “Who in the world would clap along to the Ravel Concerto?” I thought. I soon realized that it was one of the students from the school for exceptional children. It was, perhaps, the single most beautiful performing moment I have ever experienced. There was a child who lived unencumbered by the social morays that hold back the non-exceptional. We were playing together so well that we could make a mental handicapped child clap along to the beat. He was responding with an enthusiasm that couldn’t be contained by the proscribed audience behavior.

The event was a cathartic moment for me. When I had finished the evening concert later that night, I was finished with the piano in some sense. I remember thinking, “OK. I’ve done that. Now what else can I do?” It wasn’t that I was going to give up the piano or stop practicing altogether. It was that I wanted to become a musician. I started practicing the organ vigorously after that concert. I also decided that what I really wanted from my musical life was to be a composer. Instead of practicing for three or four hours a day, I started focusing on being a composer first and a pianist second. It seems odd at times that my first big success as a concert soloist was the basis for studying composition in earnest. The thing was, I had to learn something that was more valuable to me than playing the piano.

After that morning, I knew two things. I didn’t want to play in places with non-union stagehands, and I wanted to learn how to write music that could make mentally handicapped children clap.

Question for my theorist friends

2012-03-08T09:45:00.002-06:00

Chorale #183 in Riemenschneider

Would you let your students write this bit that happens over the 2nd barline? The key signature is G major, by the way.

Draft: framework for my lecture on the history of Christian music

2012-03-05T22:34:00.002-06:00

When we talk about the history of Christian music, we are immediately confronted with difficult terminology. What exactly do we mean when we say “Christian music”? Do we mean – in the rather unorthodox parlance of the modern evangelical movement – that there was an F sharp that one day went to a tent meeting somewhere in Alabama, heard a particularly moving sermon, and walked down an aisle to invite Jesus into his little F sharp heart? (Ironically, F sharps are boys while G flats are girls.)

If the notes themselves don’t have any specific religious commitments, what do we mean when we say that there is such an animal as "Christian music”? Do we mean that the words, the lyrical content is Christian and the music may be having it’s own secular thoughts? So, the words have gone to the tent meeting in Alabama, but the music has been out at a club somewhere all night. The music wakes up with a bit of a hangover, and the words wind up sharing a cab with the music back to the airport. The words are talking about Jesus, and all the while the F sharp is thinking about the really cute G flat that he met last night?

In some ways, this is an excellent paradigm for viewing the history of Christian music. While untangling the thorny, Gordian knot of what “Christian music” may actually be is extremely difficult, taking a look at the actual musical artifacts is fairly easy. It should be noted, however, that this uncomfortable cab ride to the airport has been part of the story from the beginning. In the late 390s, St. Augustine mentions the problem in a famous passage of the Confessions. He says,

“I see that our minds are more devoutly and earnestly inflamed in piety by the holy words when they are sung than when they are not. And I recognize that all the diverse affections of our spirits have their appropriate measures in the voice and song, to which they are stimulated by I know not what secret correlation. But the pleasures of my flesh--to which the mind ought never to be surrendered nor by them enervated--often beguile me while physical sense does not attend on reason, to follow her patiently, but having once gained entry to help the reason, it strives to run on before her and be her leader. Thus in these things I sin unknowingly…Sometimes I go to the point of wishing that all the melodies of the pleasant songs to which David’s Psalter is adapted should be banished both from my ears and from those of the Church itself. In this mood, the safer way seemed to me the one I remember was once related to me concerning Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who required the readers of the psalm to use so slight an inflection of the voice that it was more like speaking than singing. However, when I call to mind the tears I shed at the songs of thy Church at the outset of my recovered faith, and how even now I am moved, not by the singing but by what is sung (when they are sung with a clear and skillfully modulated voice), I then come to acknowledge the great utility of this custom. Thus I vacillate between dangerous pleasure and healthful exercise. I am inclined--though I pronounce no irrevocable opinion on the subject--to approve of the use of singing in the church, so that by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional mood.”

St. Augustine is worried that his congregation will be more drawn to the beauty of the creation, the music than to the beauty of the creator. For the sake of “weaker minds”, however, he decides that he’ll allow them into the cab to listen to the F sharp and the word having a conversation on the way to the airport. In the end, that conversation produced some earth shaking results that have transformed the very way we conceive and think about music. Indeed, it is hard to think of music - any music - apart from the results of that conversation.

The Christian Artist: More on the divided existence

2012-03-01T22:33:00.004-06:00

In my last post on the divided existence of the religious artist (which you can read here), I began discussing the struggle that many artists face between their religious and artistic lives. I found a lovely passage in Wolterstorff's Art in Action today that further clarifies the issue.

"The work of the high-art artist may be an expression and affirmation of the convictions of some religious community - Rouault, Messiaen, Penderecki, Eliot, are examples. But that is fundamentally irrelevant to his acceptance and position as artist. What counts is simply his contribution to the community of his fellow artists. In that way the institution of high art, for all its residual mysticism, is a profoundly secular institution - with the result that the artist who identifies himself deeply with some religious community will constantly have the experience of being a divided self living in two worlds. The institution of high art is a jealous god!"

Wolterstorff is a wonderful thinker from the Reformed tradition who has helped me to clarify many of my own thoughts. I think that he very accurately describes the problem here. I still wonder if this has to be the only paradigm. That is, there was a time when the Church was the institution of high art.

If I safely assume that the world has always been a "profoundly secular institution" and the Church as the "institution of high art" was sending it's message out through art objects, was the artist still "a divided self living in two worlds"? Maybe. Maybe we are also coming into some of the underlying paradigms of the Reform tradition where there is a very clear delineation between the sacred and the secular. I'm sure my Reformed friends will take me to task and clarify my thinking.

The Christian Artist: The divided existence between art and church

2012-02-28T13:24:00.002-06:00

"The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays -- not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship."

The quote above is all over the web and is attributed to Martin Luther. It turns out that he never said it. The scholarly opinion is that it probably has an American source. It bends Luther’s teaching on vocation a little more than it should. Luther would have taught that the maid and the shoemaker would be fulfilling their vocation insofar as they were serving their neighbor. Presumably, serving your neighbor also means doing a good job at your vocation, but the claims our neighbor has on us trump God’s “interest in good craftsmanship”.

I still like the quote very much because it brings out one of the central issues involved in being a Christian artist. We are approaching dangerous territory here. Whenever the subject of craftsmanship comes up, we get immediately suspicious of who the arbiters of “quality” might be. We have a terrible history of excluding the simple and honest beauty of the untrained artist in the name of a cultural bias that equates complexity with profundity.

So, without delving into the subject of what counts as “good craftsmanship”, let’s at least come to a place where we can say that it does not honor God if we try to mask something that we know is poor by putting a little cross on it. Unfortunately, this happens all the time. The tyranny of functionality sweeps aside the honest and the unique.

The very sad consequences are that many artists cannot find room for themselves in church anymore. It’s not so much that people who have spent years training and perfecting their craft don’t have room for people that want to participate in artistic endeavors for fun. It’s that people who participate in more accessible and popular forms of culture don’t make room in the worship experience for people that are trained.

The result of this exclusion is a bifurcation in the life of a religious artist that is ultimately unhealthy. I have many friends and colleagues who think of their artistic lives as something that they practice outside of the church. One wrote to me recently stating the problem like this, “A friend and I were just discussing the fact that we have never seen a piece of theatre designed for the church that speaks ART as well as truth. It's all contrived Christmas pagent-y stuff.”

The quote is telling. You experience the power of art outside the church. The church isn’t interested in serious art. Artists aren’t allowed to do something “real” in the church, only something “pagent-y”. I have a deep-seated belief that Christian artists need to be able to offer their gift – in all of its power and strangeness – in the context of worship to be whole.

I am personally serving in a congregation where we have tremendous freedom and encouragement from the clergy to take some artistic risks. I have played music and musical styles in worship services that I never imagined I would be able to include in worship services. I had resigned myself to having a certain part of my artistic life only having a place outside of the church. To be able to explore those areas in the context of worship has been a great source of healing and comfort for me. The surprising thing about the experience is that the reaction has been extremely positive from the congregation as well. What I thought would be too radical for an untrained person to grasp has often turned out to be the very thing that moved him/her the most.

The Christian Artist: Why there is no such thing as "Christian" art

2012-02-27T13:00:00.001-06:00

One of the big questions is whether or not there is such a thing as “Christian” art. I think the answer to that question is that there is not such a thing in any objective sense, but I want to be careful in explaining what I mean.

In an interesting passage in Exodus 31, God says to Moses, “Look, I have called Bezallel…and have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom and understanding and knowledge and with all kinds of aptitude, to artistically work with gold, silver, ore, to artistically cut stones and set them, to cut wood artistically, and make all kinds of work.”

Of course woodcutting didn’t make St. Paul’s list of spiritual gifts, but the passage is clear. There are people who are specially gifted by the Spirit of God to make art works for religious use. If that is the case, why can’t we make an argument that there is such a thing as “religious” art. The answer is that once the work of art is created it doesn’t remain stable.

If I borrow some of Martin Buber’s thoughts about aesthetic philosophy, it works like this. During the creative process, the artist is engaged in an I/Thou relationship with the form that is confronting his/her spirit/imagination. Once the work is “bodied forth”, it enters into the world of objectivity. It is an “It” amongst other “Its”. There is always the possibility that it can “blaze up into the present” and become a religious experience, but it doesn’t necessarily have to happen. In fact, it can do quite the opposite.

Nothing in Scripture exemplifies this more than Nehushtan. In Numbers 21, the Israelites have sinned, and God has punished them by sending poisonous snakes to the camp. They repent, and God comes to the rescue by telling Moses to make art. “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make yourself a bronze snake and raise it up as a sign; whoever is bitten and looks at it, he will live.’” It is a beautiful passage about the healing power of “religious” art. So, if God commands Moses to make a bronze sculpture, why can’t we safely say that there is such a thing as a “religious” art object. As I said before, the problem is, the art doesn’t remain stable.

We find out in 2 Kings 18 (during Hezikiah’s reign some 500 years later), that the people kept the bronze snake, named it Nehushtan, and were burning incense to it – presumably in imitation of the common snake cults of the time. Through misuse, what was once a work of “religious” art for healing – even commanded by God - becomes an object of religious destruction.

It seems to me that if our creative work enters the objective world and can be used for either healing or destructive purposes, the holiness of the art is not in the thing itself but in its use. Any work of religious art can ultimately be used wrongly for destructive purposes. The good news is that if that is the case, any work of art created for destructive purposes can potentially “blaze up into present” and become a religious experience.

The Christian Artist: Jesus' parables

2012-02-26T13:32:00.000-06:00

The parables of Jesus are the closest thing we have to something that would fall under the category of artistic output. The parables show the marks of someone who was deeply involved in the creative process. Anything that conveys so much in so few words has to be thought about deeply, worked on, and edited.

There are a few conclusions that I think it is fairly safe to draw from the fact that Jesus was a storyteller. The first is that it is a good and healthy part of our spiritual lives to be involved in some sort of creative activity that gives expression to our experience.

In a society that is constantly pressing towards immediate comprehensibility, it is significant that the gospels (especially Mark’s) make so much of the fact that the majority of people who heard Jesus’ parables did not understand them. They were “ever seeing without perceiving, hearing without understanding.”

Many artists who have worked in churches know only too well that ideas are regularly shot down because the congregation might not be able to grasp it. In some of my previous congregations, immediate comprehensibility was certainly a higher priority than artistic vision. In large part, this occurred because the art needed to serve a functional purpose. I’m not opposed to functional art in any sense. I think of it like this: a Styrofoam cup serves just as well for drinking coffee as a mug. However, Styrofoam cups are ugly and aesthetically unsatisfying. I think we should drink from mugs. I think mugs honor the coffee. Mugs allow us to experience the coffee with more than a functional delivery device.

Jesus’ parables are mugs. They are not Styrofoam cups. They are carefully crafted and rich with twists and oddities that are not always (and sometimes maybe never) immediately understood. Consider this example: “Or how can someone go in the house of a strong man and rob it, unless he tie up the strong man beforehand, and then rob the house?” Here we see Jesus taking an artistic risk. It could easily be misinterpreted. A clever thief is an example for our spiritual life. In another parable, Jesus commends the practices of a dishonest steward.

I don’t think that Jesus is asking us to be dishonest or to get good at robbing by telling us these stories. I do think that we need the help of theology to distill some meaning from them. Setting meaning and interpretation aside, I would suggest that this sort of risky story telling is exactly the sort of artistic endeavor that has lost its place in the modern church. Consider the profundity of the example. Jesus tells stories of immoral behavior without much (if any) explanatory commentary underlining the lesson. He is certainly well within the tradition of the book of Genesis. He is also well outside of our current practice.

If we are to recovery the deepest sense of what it means to be an artist, immediate comprehensibility cannot be the rubric by which all of our works are evaluated.

The Christian Artist: Psalms v. Theology

2012-02-25T12:31:00.001-06:00

A comment that is often made about the Psalms is that they give voice to the full array of human emotions. In them, we read of joy and depression, hope and despair, friendship and hatred, love of God and doubts about God’s goodness. Many of the sentiments expressed in the Psalms don’t fit very easily into the traditional and more systematic theologies that have been passed down to us.

A magnificent example is Psalm 71:12. “God, be not far from me; my God, hurry to help me!” Theologically speaking, it is incorrect to say that God is far from us. We are far from God sometimes, but God is never far from us. Note that the Psalmist does not pray like a theologian. He does not say, “Theologically speaking, I know that you are not far from me, but I sort of feel that way right now. I know it’s really me that’s far from you, so, self, don’t be so far from God.’” The Psalmist, praying like a child, gives immediate voice to the thoughts and feelings of his heart without concern for the theological correctness of the words.

This is an issue of calling and responsibility. It is the job and duty of the clergy to present the Word and Sacraments and be theologically correct. It is the job and calling of the artist to present thoughts and feelings in ways that aren’t always theologically correct in their immediacy.

It is the artist who is allowed to sing with Jeremiah, “O Lord you have deceived me, and I was deceived.” The artist is allowed to sing with the Psalmist, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The clergy are not allowed to come to the pulpit and say that God deceives and forsakes people. It would be wrong and irresponsible. In a way, the clergy get to speak to the eternal aspects of things. The artist gives voice to the ‘here and now’ of the human condition. It’s not that the lines don’t occasionally blur. Clergy are allowed to do artistic things, and artists are allowed to speak to eternity. However, the fundamental callings and responsibilities are different.

Each group needs the other. Clergy need to make room for artists to give expression to things that don’t often fit very neatly into theology. Artists should not expect clergy to compromise their theological responsibilities for the sake of an individual artistic vision. Clergy need to make room for artists, because artists teach us how to pray with bold and childlike expression. Artists need clergy to contextualize and interpret their art within the larger theological tradition.

As this relationship has deteriorated in the 20th century, the results are plainly visible in local congregations. Artists no longer see the church as a place that is interested in what they do, so they turn to the Academy for spiritual nurturing. The Academy is not designed to fulfill that task. Churches are then left with art that is largely functional. There are no risks in it, and consequently, there is often very little power in it.

Is there room in today’s church for a poet to say, “No one thinks of you when they are dead; who will thank you when they are among the dead?” I think that the answer is mostly, “No.” It’s too complicated, messy, and powerful.

The Christian Artist: Genesis

2012-02-23T21:12:00.003-06:00

A few events have occurred over the past few weeks that have shown me that there is a need to address some of the issues surrounding what it means to be a Christian artist in contemporary society. As I turned my mind toward the issue, I thought a good place to begin covering the subject would be some short essays on what we can learn about the arts from the Bible.

In Genesis we see the entire human condition portrayed in story. If biblical scholarship has taught us anything, it is that these stories were passed down through generations, told around campfires, and recounted when tucking children in at night - in much the same way as they are today. Of course, one of the well-known features of the Hebrew Scriptures is the way that they unabashedly present their heroes’ faults while making a spiritual point. If we set aside theological controversies over how the Bible was written and consider the artistic and creative aspect, the boldness with which the stories are conveyed is striking. Is there a church today where a pastor or priest gets up for the sermon and says, “For you spiritual edification today, I’m going to tell you a little story about…

Murdering members of your family (Cain and Abel)
Incest (Noah – drunk with his son, Lot – drunk once with each daughter)
Xenophobia and threatened rape (Sodom)
Sex with what you thought was a prostitute but turned out to be your daughter-in-law (Judah and Tamar)
Lying about idols that you’ve stolen, hiding them under your saddle bags, and telling your father that you can’t get up because you’re having your period (Rachel)
A jealous wife buying a night of sex with her husband from her sister wife for the price of some magical mandrake roots (Leah)

The reason that this doesn’t happen in a sermon is that many of the more sordid details of these stories are not age appropriate for the children that are often present during worship services. That the stories exist suggests to me that there is a place where we can address the full human experience in an artistic fashion. When we tell children about Noah, we focus on the animals and the ark. We tend to skip that bit where the world is fresh and new, and Noah decides to imitate his father Adam by messing it up again. Noah is given a fresh start, and the first thing he does is get drunk and have some sort of sexual encounter with his son. The point is easy to grasp. We are messed up and in great need of God. Even when we get a fresh start, we mess up in horrifying ways. God still looks after us.

If the Bible is not afraid to portray the human condition in its deepest darkness, the Christian artist should be allowed a place to portray some of the same issues. I think that the distinction is whether or not you are portraying sin in a way that glorifies and encourages it. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that Genesis is not written like a TV sitcom. The stories are often presented without commentary. The moral point is not underlined for us. This suggests to me that we can make room for artistic endeavors that portray the human experience without being overly didactic.

In some ways, the Christian artist has an advantageous framework from which to work. We don’t pretend about the depth of human wickedness. Since even the parts of us that we like to think of as “good” are in desperate need of the redeeming work of Jesus, we can boldly portray the evil that is lurking in our own person without playing around like it’s not there. We trust that in the end, our sin will be redeemed by the work done for us on the cross. That sin includes not only our lust and murder, but also our religious intentions and charity. As the Psalmist says, “before you, no one living is righteous.” If Genesis is written with such bold artistic freedom, we need to make room for the same sort of artistic freedom in our own creative work.

Maybe Go Tell It is having a comeback

2012-02-23T09:00:00.002-06:00

Here's a lovely performance that popped up by the East Carolina University Chamber singers.

L'incorinazione di Poppea and censorship

2012-02-22T00:22:00.002-06:00

This week, the Lincoln Public Schools decided not to send students to see the University’s opera production because it was deemed too controversial. Of course, some people are up in arms about censorship etc. Normally, I’m opposed to censorship, but I’m not sure that this is a case of undue infringement of rights.

In case you are wondering, the controversial opera is the 1642 masterpiece by Claudio Monteverdi L’incorinazione di Poppea. It covers Poppea’s rise to the position of Empress, the divorce and banishment of Ottavia, and Nero’s philandering. (The part where Nero eventually kicks her in the stomach and kills her is conveniently left out.) To be sure, the opera is very graphic. Perhaps one of the most explicit scenes occurs when Nero and the poet Lucan sing about a very specific sexual act with references to le petite mort accompanied by very descriptive music and Nero reaching a climax while Lucan is carrying on about Poppea’s mouth drawing pearls out of the Arabian sea. The scene is as shocking today as it was almost 400 years ago.

Now, the 16th and 17th centuries were no strangers to ribald humor and explicit material in both popular music and in art music. You do have to know the “code” to understand some of it, but once you do, seemingly innocent songs can become transformed into surprisingly bawdy depictions of intimacy. In many ways, it makes me think that we are much more prudish in contemporary society than they were back then. I’ve often pondered how many high schools sing sexually explicit madrigals without understanding the real meaning. I’ve wondered why they allow Shakespeare and come to the conclusion that most of the references are lost on younger children. To think that I read this in 9th grade at a Christian school!

SAMPSON
True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague's men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.
GREGORY
The quarrel is between our masters and us their men.
SAMPSON
'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the maids, and cut off their heads.
GREGORY
The heads of the maids?
SAMPSON
Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads, take it in what sense thou wilt.

Then again, we have plenty of sexually explicit lyrics in our popular music today. So, it’s hard to argue that we are more prudish. The difference is, I can’t see 50 cent performing “Candy Shop” in front of President Obama at the White House in the same way that I can imagine John Dowland playing his lute and singing “Come again” in front of Royalty.

As in most cases like this, it is probably true that nothing in the opera is covering subject material with which the average high school student is more thoroughly familiar than his/her parents wish to acknowledge. The question here is about having a deep respect for the relationship between a parent and a child. If we are going to expose children to explicit sexual material, their parents probably have a right to know before the fact. While all of it is done on a level of sophistication that so far beyond 50 Cent’s crude analogy, to pretend that it is not sexually explicit and powerful seems to me to deny the power of music, opera, and live theatre.

Another way to say it is: Opera is for grown-ups. It deals with all the real and terrible truths of the human experience. That parents should be allowed some say so in when their children are exposed to some of those issues does not seem to be that big of an issue to me – if only for the sake of their own deluded conscience.

Perhaps, a better solution would be to tell the parents before hand that the opera very graphically depicts sexual acts musically. If you want to opt out, you should feel free. If you feel that your child is mature enough to handle one of the great masterpieces of Western Civilization, let them go. In any case, we shouldn’t pretend that great art doesn’t have real power and doesn’t deal with real grown-up issues and problems.

St. Mark's on the Campus

2012-02-16T14:55:00.003-06:00

One of the great pleasures in my life is getting to listen to the lovely volunteers that make up the choir at St. Mark's on the Campus. Anyone that regularly works with a volunteer choir knows some of the frustrations that can occur. You have people of wildly different musical training and ability coming together to make art to enhance a congregation's worship - or, as we say in the Anglican tradition, "to perfect the praises of God's people."

We have the added inconvenience at St. Mark's of being on a University campus that controls all the parking. We can only rehearse for an hour each week. The members of the choir pay for parking to rehearse in the brief interval that occurs after afternoon classes end and before evening classes begin.

Still, there is something wonderful about people getting together to make music just because they love it. Somehow, even with a few intonation issues that occur, I seem to love this group more and more. I enjoy making music with them each week, oftentimes more than some of the professional concerts that occur week in and week out.

Here they are singing Heavenly Light by Kopolow arr. by Wilhousky. I got to record and just listen. There are enough talented conductors in the group to allow me to simply enjoy the music.

some more thoughts on the death of concert music

2012-02-09T23:42:00.003-06:00

In the past few days, a little vortex in the collective unconsciousness opened above my head, and a gyre of synchronicity came spinning down. Colleagues from around the country representing various academic institutions and performing arts organizations have been expressing their frustrations to me using a remarkably similar leitmotif.

Performers are frustrated that conductors are more concerned about the glory they may receive than they are about the music they perform. Academics are frustrated that decisions are made for reasons that serve their institutions reputations more than they serve the needs of the students. Arts organizations make artistic compromises to attract a wider audience. Universities are filled with bloated administrations that don’t really understand or care about music departments. Everyone complains about budget cuts.

I’ve addressed some of these issues before here. If you didn’t get the memo, our culture is changing. Serious music is no longer something that is valued by the culture at large. There are many people that are inventing interesting and practical solutions to some of these problems. I would like to take a moment to talk about some of the more personal and “impractical” solutions.

Some years ago, I was having a discussion with a younger composer friend. I said, “What is it, you want to be?” He responded, “I want to be a famous composer.” I said, “There isn’t such an animal in the bestiary anymore. Who is the most famous composer of orchestral music alive today in your opinion?” He said, “Corigliano.” I said, “OK. Let’s say I give you Corigliano. I happen to like his music. Do you know how many music majors have never heard of Corigliano? The most famous composer of orchestral music alive today is John Williams. Do you want to limit your harmonic vocabulary and write the kind of music that John Williams writes?” “No,” he said.

If, as I suggested, there isn’t such a thing as a famous composer (at least in the 19th century way that he was using the words), where should we turn for advice on how to live? In the past ten years, I have become increasingly interested in the analogies between monastic spirituality and what we do as professional musicians. There are some innate difficulties in the two paths because we practice something that is very public, and monks live in isolation. Nevertheless, I think the brothers have some good advice for us.

Thomas á Kempis says, “If thou wilt know or learn anything profitably, desire to be unknown, and to be little esteemed by man.” Practically speaking, how do you practice a public profession and “desire to be unknown”? Here are my suggestions.

1. If you are in this business, you’d better be in it because you love music. My friend Tom Trenney says, “There are people in our profession who like being musicians more than they like music.” Tom is a wise man. There are some who can still get away with this attitude, but I can assure you that it is no way to live your life. You will always be placing your worth in the opinions of others. Others are a very fickle bunch.

2. If your focus is on making the best music you can with the people around you, you can actually get to a place where you are serving the music instead of thinking about what the music can do for you and your career. A better way to say this is that our model for the present age cannot be the 19th century. I personally love the early Romantics and what they were trying to accomplish, but those days are gone. Our models have to be the Baroque musicians who wrote music for their local city and fully expected that when they died, their music would be packed up in some room in the church and never played again. Cast off the weight of posterity. Write, sing, and play with the abandon and dedication of a kleinmeister.

3. Contemplate this passage from Thomas Merton often. "A publisher asked me to write something on 'The Secret of Success,' and I refused. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves."

4. Part of what is special about what we do is that it is something that is intrinsically valuable and not valued by much of our culture. We are the prophetic voice calling the mass of trousered apes to seek out depth and meaning. You really shouldn’t get that upset when the monkey starts throwing his feces at you through the bars. Getting mad isn’t really going to convince him that what your doing is a better way to live.

5. Remember that we get to make music for a living. There are very few people on this planet that actually get to make some or all of their existence by assembling beautiful sounds. A bad day of making music must be so much better than a bad day of doing almost anything else.

Aesthetics: the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and hot chicks in the woods

2012-02-08T22:45:00.005-06:00

Any time you start talking about a philosophy of beauty, it is important to ask the right questions. The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury can bring it with some eloquent prose stylings. In a lovely little essay called “The Moralists”, he sets up a dialogue between Philocles and Theocles. They are having a stroll in the countryside and discussing art and beauty.

Master Philocles is the student master Theocles, and Philocles has grown rhapsodic about the beauty of the woods. He asks the first big question,

“But tell me, I entreat you, how comes it that, excepting a few philosophers of your sort, the only people who are enamoured in this way, and seek the woods, the rivers, or seashores, are your poor vulgar lovers?”

Why don’t philosophers like the woods? Well, if you’re like me, you might expect Theocles to respond, “For starters, you have to go to the bathroom on the ground, there are bugs, and dangerous wild beasts. It’s kind of hard to philosophize when your constantly wondering if you remembered to bring toilet paper with you.”

Theocles actually says, “Say not this…of lovers only. For is it not the same with poets, and all those other students in nature and the arts which copy after her?”

So, the lovely, dark and deep woods aren’t just for vulgar lovers. Poets and artists like it too. Maybe the poets and the artists are also the vulgar lovers. In any case, the people that like the woods are “looked upon…as a people either plainly out of their wits, or overrun with melancholy and enthusiasm.”

Well, master Philocles says that even though he doesn’t always understand it, he really does love the woods and the oceans. Theocles then says, “If you love the water so much, why don’t you marry it?” In Shaftesbury’s prose it sounds more elegant.

“The next thing I should do, ‘tis likely, upon this frenzy, would be to hire some bark and go in nuptial ceremony, Venetian-like, to wed the gulf, which I might call perhaps as properly my own.”

Theocles then basically says, “Don’t stop there. If you’re going to have a real philosophy of art and beauty, there is something even more complicated than pledging your troth to the Gulf of Mexico: What about hot chicks? Where do they fit in to your philosophy?”

Poor Philocles knew it was coming and gives a helpless response.

“I feared, said I, indeed, where this would end, and was apprehensive you would force me at last to think of certain powerful forms in human kind which draw after them a set of eager desires, wishes, and hopes; no way suitable, I must confess, to your rational and refined contemplation of beauty. The proportions of this living architecture, as wonderful as they are, inspire nothing of a studious or contemplative kind. The more they are viewed, the further they are from satisfying by mere view.”

Ah, the pretty girl! The bane of the philosopher’s existence. It's awfully difficult to think about them dispassionately. What was it Socrates said after Xanthippe dumped the chamber pot on his head? “Marry, or marry not. In any case, you’ll regret it.”

As one friend remarked, “With a name like Shaftesbury, he probably had to cover that subject.”

Aesthetics: the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and plastic truth

2012-02-07T22:34:00.002-06:00

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, is not to be confused with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury. He should also not be confused with Anthony Ashley Cooper the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th Earls of Shaftesbury. The current and 12th Earl of Shaftesbury is Nicholas Ashley Cooper. He was the younger brother of the 11th Earl, and inherited the title whilst working as a techno DJ in New York. He had the good sense to name his son Anthony Ashley Cooper.

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury is a transitional figure in the history of aesthetics. He stands between the classicists and the moderns. Because he is English, he writes wonderful essays that are not attempts at systematic thought.

Following the Greeks and the early Christian thinkers, he treats beauty and truth as synonyms. His thoughts will take some time to tackle, but I think the following passages are an interesting starting point. He traces a line of Aristotle’s thought in Poetics where Aristotle says, “Poetry is both a more philosophic and a more real thing than history; for poetry tells rather the universal, history the particular.”

Shaftesbury suggests that “the best artists are said to have been indefatigable in studying the best statues: as esteeming them a better rule than the perfectest human bodies could afford.” Aside, from getting to use “perfectest” in a sentence, the cool thing about this idea is that great art always includes something universal that is better captured in a statue than in a specific perfectest body.

The artist that gets too bogged down in the particular runs the risk of producing “irregular and short-lived works”. The “higher” truth in art that is above historical truth is given the name “graphical or plastic truth” in Shaftesbury’s essays.

To my knowledge, suggesting the idea of “graphical or plastic truth” is at least a new way of writing about art at this time. It is certainly a shot across the bow of Descartes and a mechanistic view of the universe. He is staking out an area for artistic truth to have precedence over scientific truth.

I wonder, however, what sort of plastic truth he would have found in the techno music of his great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson Nicholas.

some thoughts on Leonard Bernstein

2012-02-01T10:03:00.002-06:00

Earlier this week, I played a Leonard Bernstein review show. Bernstein is a composer with whom I’ve always had a somewhat complicated aesthetic relationship. He did so much for music that I am hesitant to be critical, but the truth is that some of his writing makes me a bit uncomfortable. I think I may have figured out what it is.

I think that the Bernstein of West Side Story and On The Town is when he is at his best. It comes across as extremely interesting and sophisticated popular music. I think that the Bernstein of the Mass is less successful.

I was playing a recording of the Simple Song, and my wife called to me from the other room asking, “What are you listening to? It’s awful.” I said, “Take a guess.” She responded, “Andrew Lloyd Weber? Claude Michelle Schonberg? Contemporary Christian Music?”

Perhaps, what is happening comes from his love and respect for all kinds of music. That love manifested itself in his writing through musical choices that occasionally reference popular clichés. The danger for a composer that makes that choice is that the reference may become dated and associated with ideas that reach beyond what you intend.

I’ve experienced something similar in religious services. Occasionally, I’ve heard a religious text that uses a chord progression that has become too worn out from overuse in 70s. It is uncanny how the feelings that I have always associated with that chord progression (when I’ve heard it in a Broadway musical or a popular song) rise up and begin an argument with the text.

So, occasionally, I find that some of his music sounds kind of corny because of musical references that seem to be a little too tired to bear up under the weight of the emotional impact of the content. I find myself growing suspicious of him and doubting his sincerity. Here we have a composer who could write successful Broadway musicals and something as rich and complex as The Age of Anxiety. Why does he sometimes cross that thin line between the simple and the simplistic?

That’s usually the point when I start regretting my thought process. I’d hate it if someone started criticizing everything I ever wrote and making assumptions about my intentions. In the end, I decide to leave the man alone. I do have two problems left over to resolve.

#1 I don’t know of another composer whose output I like and dislike so much.

#2 I hate the way some of the older musicians who did one performance with him back in the 60s or 70s casually say, “Well, when I worked with Lenny…” as if calling him by his nickname is a shibboleth of one’s personal musical sophistication and excellence.

some thoughts on the death of concert music

2012-01-25T23:09:00.003-06:00

In his recent articles in The American Organist magazine, my friend Haig Mardirosian has been tackling the problem of poor concert attendance and the seeming demise of concert music. Haig always writes articles that are both thoughtful and urbane. (You can read some of his earlier entries on his website.) His articles have inspired a few disorganized thoughts in my brain.

Haig is confronting a serious question that all musicians (and artists of any sort) face today. The arts are in trouble. Concerts are poorly attended. It’s hard to find funding for music. Even in the public school system, I know of teachers who justify their position not by the intrinsic value of what they do, but by the supposed improvement involvement in the arts gives to students on their standardized tests in other disciplines. “Music class can help your math scores.”

For my part, I think we are dead in the water when we start talking like this. As my friend Lane Harder says, “Always be prepared to make the argument.” So here is what I tell my freshman. “It’s fine that we have doctors, and lawyers, and all the rest. We need them, and that’s good. In the arts, however, we are doing something that is much more important. We are about the business of changing peoples lives. We give people life changing cathartic experiences that they can’t get anywhere else. The stage is a magical place of great power. It is a high calling to be an artist, and you better work hard so that you don’t have any weaknesses because we make our mistakes in front of crowds of people.”

I was having a discussion with a colleague the other day. We were complaining about the trend of State Universities slashing funding for the humanities. I told her about a close friend on the faculty Senate. In a session, he actually heard the Chancellor of the University say the phrase, “…and that will serve to fulfill the academic portion of the Universities mission statement.” My friend said to me, “I looked around to see if anyone else was as shocked as I was. I’m mean, he said ‘the academic portion of our mission’ like it was some little boutique thing we do on the side.” She responded to my story by saying, “and yet, when something terrible and tragic happens, they always come running back to the humanities and the arts because they need someone to teach them how to live and how to make sense of things.”

It does seem like our culture is changing. I often say to my students that Western Culture is dying, and I plan on going down with the ship. There is one thing, however, that I find terribly ironic in the whole discussion. The ship has become very large.

I don’t have actual statistics to back this up, but….There are more people practicing and listening to concert music today than at any point in human history. Mozart’s Vienna had about 250,000 people, and he had a hard time making a go of it there. He wouldn’t have been able to imagine the gargantuan modern city that is home to hundreds of arts organizations. Every major city in the world has an orchestra of extremely high quality. I’m quite sure that there are more composers writing quality concert music right now than during the 19th century. To be sure, the culture as a whole does not value it as much, but the pocket that does value it is larger that the population of Paris in 1850.

I’m not sure what that means. I do know it means that we should not be without hope. Perhaps, one of the solutions is to do what my good friends in the Chiara Quartet are doing. They play in the great concert halls, but they also play in local bars. They take the music to the people instead of just waiting for the people to come to them.

In any case, I imagine that one still becomes an artist for the same reason people have always become artists. You do it because you have to. The culture might not value it, but it’s something you do anyway. You do it because it is intrinsically valuable, and as my friend said to me, “It teaches you how to live and how to make sense of things.”

Gigging stories: outhomelessing the homeless

2012-01-23T21:59:00.003-06:00

My wife has often said that I have a “European” sense of personal hygiene. My socks seldom match. I don’t iron my shirts. I stopped combing my hair around the time I successfully emerged from my 80s New Wave look. I don’t shave regularly.

It’s not that these are conscious decisions. It’s just something that slips my mind until I am rudely awakened. For example, one day last year, I got to church to practice. When I looked down to put on my organ shoes, I was greeted by this heterogeneous vision.

My fashion sense is sometimes the subject of casual teasing by friends and students. Last Halloween, a student came to the University dressed as me. She wore a wig with a frock of messy hair. Her socks didn’t match. I even let her wear my magical, ubiquitous, and coveted green sweater. The only problem with her ensemble was that she was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt. When I saw it, I said, “When have you ever seen me wear a V-neck T-shirt? I’m sure I would never do such a thing.” The reply came in a simple, honest tone. “I’m sorry Dr. Knecht, but it was the wrinkliest shirt I had.” "I see. Thank you very much." I replied.

The nadir of my apparel epiphanies occurred when I was working in a downtown church that was frequented by the homeless. We kept some food in the pantry to hand out to the needy, and at certain times of the day, I was the only staff member around that could help. One day, a handsome black man named Alvin walked in. I met him and immediately brought him into the sanctuary and played some Bach on the organ for him. I feel like if you are having a difficult time in life, you probably need some moments of beauty and not just food. Homeless people are generally very appreciative of moments of beauty and quiet.

After I finished playing, we began to chat. It turned out that Alvin wasn’t homeless after all. He just needed some extra food. I retrieved a few cans of soup from the pantry as we continued to chat. Alvin was beginning to feel comfortable with me, so he finally opened up.
“Kurt, what I really need is a ride. There are two churches that I know about that will give me an entire bag of groceries. It’s too far to walk. Can you take me there, and then give me a ride back home?”

It was just about time for my lunch break, so I agreed. When I got hired, the church had given me a used BMW 735il that was in very good condition. We drove along the bay for about 10 minutes, and soon came to a church that was a block from my old high school. I decided to accompany Alvin in on the adventure. We walked inside, and I sat in the lobby while he spoke to the receptionist. When Alvin finished speaking with her, he sat down next to me. She vanished for a few moments. To my great surprise, she reappeared moments later with two grocery bags full of food. She gave one to Alvin. The second one was placed at my feet. I looked up at her quizzically. She smiled and said, “This is for you.”
“Oh!” I said. “I’m OK. I was just here with Alvin. I wasn’t coming to get…”
Before I could finish, she smiled very kindly again and interrupted me.
“It’s quite alright. You really look like you could use it.”

I looked down and saw the unmatched socks and the wrinkled, un-tucked shirt. I realized my hair was uncombed, and my face was covered in at least three days worth of facial hair. It dawned on me that her conclusion was not all that unreasonable. So, I just went with it. I looked up gratefully and said, “I see. Thank you very much. That’s very kind of you.”

“It’s really no problem. We just need you to come over here and sign for the food. We use this system so that people don’t take more than one bag per week. You are welcome to come back next week and get another bag of groceries.”

“Thanks” I said, as I signed the form. We left the church, got into the BMW, and drove off. Alvin stopped in at another church. I decided not to accompany him inside this time. He came out with more food, and I took him back to his place in the ghetto. Naturally, I gave my bag of groceries to him.

It's a little strange to be directly and viscerally confronted with your own eccentricities. I immediately drove back to the church and practiced some Bach. It had a quiet moment of beauty in the sanctuary, and I said, "I see. Thank you very much."

For further reading on the topic of "The organist as social worker" click here or here.

Viola violets in my garden

2012-01-18T23:08:00.004-06:00

I made a little garden tonight using pencils, organ pipes, bells, and the harmonic series. The incomparable Jonah Sirota came strolling through with his viola mixing his rosin with the incense and the candles.

Gigging stories: the time I met Bob Marley

2012-01-16T16:43:00.003-06:00

There is a wonderful loneliness that can settle into a church when you have spent several hours in solitude practicing some thorny section of a Bach Fugue. The tinted light from the stained glass dances around the high ceilings with the F sharps and the B flats. One afternoon after several hours of practice, I had worked myself into an eremitical splendor. I lifted my hands from the keyboard to begin a passage again when I heard an infinitesimally quiet, “Hello” from about ten feet to my left.

I turned, somewhat shocked, to see that a homeless man had wandered up into the gallery where I was practicing. It was not my first experience combining my position as an organist with that of a social worker. (You can read one of those episodes here.) I turned, looked at the stranger, and calmly replied, “Hello.”
He was a short man of slight build. He was fairly clean and looked to be in his late twenties. He responded in great surprise, “You heard me?!”
“Well, I’m a musician. We tend to be aware of sounds around us.”
“I didn’t think anyone could hear me when I spoke that softly.”
“Um…OK. I’m just practicing here. Do you like organ music?”
“I’m Bob.”
“Hi, Bob. I’m Kurt.”
“Music is very powerful and spiritual. It has a strong affect on the I and I.” At this point, he began to mumble and I heard something about “Selassie”.

Whenever a mid-Western, white, twenty-something homeless man starts espousing Rastafarian doctrine, I get the sneaking suspicion that his mind might be more volatile than I anticipated. So, I said, “Well, this is an organ that’s modeled after a 17th century Italian instrument.” He replied with an incoherent thought that included something about “Zion” and “Jah”. I immediately decided to move our conversation to a more public area of the building.
“Do you want some water?” I asked.
As we moved toward the kitchen, I reminded myself to start locking the door that leads up to the organ loft for future practice sessions.

As we drank water, he continued to talk about how Selassie had changed the I and I. I hopelessly attempted to follow a train of thought that was having trouble staying on the rails. I offered him some food, but he said he wasn’t hungry.
“Well,” I said, “is there anything that the I and I can help you with?” playing along for the fun of it.

In a stunning display of coherence, he said, “My main problem is that the probate court has declared me incompetent, so my parents have guardianship of me even though I’m 29.”
“Really?” I asked attempting to sound as credulous as possible.
“I just want to live in an apartment by myself, but they make me live in this home. I can’t get my money in the bank without my parents because of the probate court. So, I wanted to talk to the priest about vouching for my competency.”
“Well, he’s not here today.” Unable to resist, I pressed the issue.
“Um. Why does the court think you’re incompetent?”

Here he switched to what can only be described as a terrible Jamaican accent and said, “They don’t understand, mon. Just because someone starts wearing Rastafarian clothes, starts speaking in a Jamaican accent, mon, and changes his name to Bob Marley, mon, and only responds to people when they call him Bob Marley, mon, and when he does respond, he responds by quoting the lyrics to a song written by Bob Marley, mon, because he’s memorized the lyrics to all the songs that Bob Marley wrote, mon, because they speak to the I and I…just because someone dresses like and talks like Bob Marley, and makes people call him Bob Marley…that doesn’t mean that he believes that he is Bob Marley.”

After taking a moment to process everything, I said rather haltingly, “But…you can see why they might get confused…right.” It was of course the wrong thing to say. He immediately repeated the entire speech convinced of its inexorable logic.

“Well, Bob,” I said, “I have to go practice. You’re welcome to listen.” He declined.

I walked upstairs to the loft, turned on the organ, and immediately played “We’re jammin’” on a 17th century Italian style instrument.

The absolutely inimitable spiritual wisdom of

2012-01-15T08:01:00.002-06:00

I constructed a long theological argument in an attempt to justify some selfish behavior. After patiently listening to me for 10 minutes, he simply stared and said, “You know, the Lord Jesus wouldn’t put up with all your bull shit.”

Unaccustomed to such plain speech from a member of the clergy, I immediately began a relationship that has lasted for about 25 years. During that time, I have often found myself quoting his inimitable spiritual wisdom to friends.

Here is a brief list of some of his more printable quotes.

• His advice to other clergy about hearing confession, “Here's the thing. If someone is confessing their sins to you and you start getting a hard-on, you need to tell them to get a different confessor.”

• Almost the entirety of his marriage counseling went like this, “There are no new sins. Just like monks take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It’s money, sex, and power. These are the things you will fight about in your marriage. If you figure out a way to get past them, you will stay married. If not, you won’t.”

• On facing the inevitable discouragement that comes from working in a religious institution, he once said to me, “The Church is a bitch-whore that eats her young. Now, get in there and love that bitch-whore that calls herself the Bride of Christ.”

• Once I called him for advice on raising teenagers. He said, “I’m going to tell you something one of my elders in Christ told me when my kids were teenagers. ‘There are some aspects of raising teenagers that are difficult and unpleasant’.”
I responded saying, “Yes, and…”
He said, “That’s all I’ve got for you. Try not to let it split you marriage apart.”

• Once, when we were discussing some theological issue, he said,
“Circumcision is one of the great proofs of God’s existence. No group of men ever sat around a fire and one of them said, ‘Hey! I got an idea! Let’s invent a religion where you have to cut the end of your dick off!’ There’s no way that ever happened.”

Gigging stories: In memoriam Carter Albrecht

2012-01-11T09:54:00.002-06:00

(N.B. This is not so much of a story about an actual gig as it is an example of the colorful characters you get to meet when you live the life of a wandering musician. In this case, the specific character is Carter Albrecht who was tragically killed in Dallas. You can read about his story here.)

After the war, my grandfather took various jobs piloting planes around the Great Lakes. He and my grandmother managed to scrape enough money together to put him through aeronautical mechanics school where they literally taught him how to build a plane from the ground up. At some point, he needed a new job. When a rich, old Lutheran lady bought a Cessna to fly medical supplies from Monrovia into the jungle, my grandfather packed up his wife and two sons, and moved ninety miles into the Liberian jungle. The Cessna was packed into crates and driven into the village of Zaw Zaw. Grandpa Knecht took the pieces out of the boxes, put the plane together, and maintained it for three years flying necessary medical supplies into the jungle. My father spent almost three years of his elementary school life in the “bush”. He was never interested in hanging around the other missionary kids because they didn’t know anything about the jungle. My grandparents let him run around with the natives.

So, I grew up hearing stories of the African jungle from my father. At some point, my father had mentioned that the Africans ran around the jungle barefoot. One day, I found a book in my grandparents’ house that contained a picture of the foot of a Liberian bushman. (Apparently, if you take a picture of the bottom of their foot it only steals the sole and not the soul). It was an inspirational photograph. The thick, leathery substance engulfing the bottom of the Liberian’s foot inspired a covetousness in me, and I was determined to acquire a similar indurate cutaneous innervation. So, I took off my shoes and walked on the hot asphalt during the hot Tampa summers. Spurred on by my determination to acquire Liberian feet, I pressed my burning flesh into the hot street. The end result was something like the callus that a hippie gets on the side of his foot from Birkenstock. My callus covered only my heel and the balls of my feet. Because of my incredibly high arches, the center of my feet have never touched the earth and remain soft and smooth as a baby's bottom. The balls of my feet and my heel, however, became insensitive to sharp rocks and even flame.

When I went to graduate school at Southern Methodist University, a group of musicians set up a little watchtower on the side entrance of the school between the Meadows School of the Arts and the Perkins Theological Seminary. Donna Mayer-Martin, the local medievalist, had stretched a tightrope between the two buildings so that the ghosts of Hildegaard and William Blake could talk to each other while balancing between God and Art. I learned how to roll a cigarette and use the words of a conversation in such a way that the smoke went up to the rope and tickled Dostoyevky’s ghost's nose . I ended my speeches with a flourish by extinguishing the cherry of the cigarette on a heel made tough from my Liberian foot fetish. Carter and Matt immediately befriended me. They were undergraduate piano majors who were easily impressed by a graduate student who knew how to put a smoke out on his bare heel. We would meet up during the evening practice hours and smoke on the steps to discuss “the ten thousand things”.

Carter was tall, good looking, and he wielded his cleverness and wit with the unassuming air of a master. Girls would walk up to Carter while we were smoking on the steps and flirtatiously say, “Um, Carter, what are you doing?” Carter would simply and unaffectedly respond, “We’re smoking. In a few minutes, we are going to take a break and practice for a while, but we’ll get back here on the steps soon to do what we came to school to do. We’re paying all this money after all.”

Despite the fact that physical education was not amongst the subjects of the trivium or the quadrivium, the Southern Methodists felt it was a necessary component of being liberally arted. Thus, every undergraduate was required to take a physical fitness class of some sort. The most popular course for music majors was Tai Chi. Students would practice their forms in front of the school. The beauty of their movements was contrasted with the awkwardness of Rodîn’s statue Eve in Despair which rested by the front door. Carter was considering the Tai Chi course. Yoga, however, was also popular amongst the music majors. Confronted with the choice of Westernized Tai Chi and Westernized Yoga, Carter attempted to balance his sense of Western integrity with the Oriental philosophy most closely fitting the needs of a performing musician. So Carter brought the problem of Zen and the Art of Registering for an Oriental Physical Education Class to Matt’s feet on a night when I was absent. When I arrived on Sunday, the click of cigarette lighters signaled the beginning of the story.

“Kurt, you know how I was thinking of choosing Yoga or Tai Chi?” queried Carter.
“Sure. Did you ever decide?”
“I was trying to decide on Friday, and Matt says…”
Matt jumped in through the smoke and said, “So, I said to Carter, ‘The only thing I know about Yoga is a body purification technique that some yogis practice. You make a gallon of warm saltwater. You guzzle the whole thing down as quickly as possible, throw up, and then your body is cleansed from impurities.’”
“You didn’t actually try this?!” I gasped incredulously.
“Well…” Carter said, “it was Saturday…and there was nothing to do…so, I got some water going on the stove and put some salt in it.”
“You drank an entire gallon of warm, saltwater?”
“Drank the whole pot.”
“Did it work? Did you puke it up?”
“As soon as I finished the last drop, I immediately ran to the bushes outside of my apartment and hurled like I never have in my entire life. I vomited for almost thirty minutes straight until I was dry heaving and couldn’t stop. As soon as I regained control of my body, I went into the house and had two hours of the worst diarrhea I have ever experienced. I was literally peeing out my ass for two solid hours.”
“Really?!”
“Yup. By the end of the process, three whole hours had gone by and I passed out in my bed at seven o’clock in the evening.”
“I can’t believe that you actually drank an entire gallon of saltwater.”
“You haven’t heard the weirdest part. I woke up the next morning, this morning, at 6AM. I felt completely light and airy. I was at one with the universe. The sun was shining, the air felt great, and I walked outside. There were birds chirping, and I knew that I was a part of all things. I was at one with the universe. I felt like Ghandi.”
Truly astonished, I said, “Really?! Well, what did you do?”
“What do you think I did?” Carter responded. “I had a cigarette and a cup of coffee as soon as possible. I hated feeling like that! I guess I’m signing up for Tai Chi.”

I started laughing, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught Jesus chuckling as he dropped a banana peel on the tight-rope for Alan Watts.

Aesthetics: Ficino's quick and easy Italian humanist guide to facial proportion

2012-01-07T21:39:00.004-06:00

I have been re-reading some of Marsilio Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposium. Ficino was writing in 1475 at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. He is basically continuing the Platonic thought in the tradition of Plotinus. Beauty and Love are very closely related and are almost synonymous with the morally good. It is all tied up in a cosmology that is all but unusable in a modern context. He relates art to concepts like "the Angelic mind", the "World-Soul", and the "Body of the World." Of course, all love of Beauty is ultimately love of God for Ficino. That's a little different than St. Augustine's cautious attitude toward beautiful things, but they are both so indebted to Plotinus that some passages could be interchangeable despite 1000 years separating them.

One thing for which Ficino is invaluable, however, is a practical guide for checking to see if your face is a properly proportioned Italian Renaissance face. If your like me, you've already had that moment when you missed your bus stop because you were lost in contemplation over life's perennial questions:

"If I had been born in Italy 535 years ago, would my face be the sort of face that would have inspired Michelangelo, or would I have had to settle for a Bronzino or a Vasari? Is there any way to get an astrolabe or some other medieval measuring device to figure out if my face corresponds to the Fibonacci series?"

Fortunately, Ficino has given us an easier way, and you can use it while riding the bus!

1. Three noses placed end to end will equal the length of one face.
2. The semi-circles of both ears joined together will equal the circle of the open mouth.
3. The joining of the eyebrows will also give the same result.
4. The length of the nose will match the length of the lips, and so also will that of the ears.
5. The two circles of the eyes will equal one opening of the mouth.
6. Eight heads will compass the height of the body.
7. The same distance will also be measured by the spread of the arms to the side, and likewise of the legs and feet.

Of course, when I first discovered Ficino's method, I spent some time measuring my nose to face ratio with my hands. I have found that this draws practically no attention when using public transportation. People are always touching their faces on the bus, and you will likely draw more attention to yourself without some sort of eccentric behavior.

In addition to using the system, I am also proposing that we begin using his name as a verb. We can say things like, "May I Ficino you?" to ask someone before we check if their joined eyebrows are the same length as their mouth. Shopkeepers can say, "I've just Ficinoed that customer, and we will need a bigger hat size to compensate for the semi-circles of the ears."

For now, have fun Ficinoing each other, and please send your comments about other practical uses of the system and the stories of your own Ficinoing.

One of my favorite versions of "Manly Men"

2012-01-05T23:27:00.002-06:00

This performance was sent to me by Mannenkoorts, a gay men's chorus in Holland, a few years ago. It is still one of my favorite performances. I love hearing it sung with the Dutch consonants.

Gigging stories: Masaryktown New Year's Eve 1999

2012-01-04T23:37:00.003-06:00

One of the unspoken rules of gigging is helping your fellow musicians when they receive unwanted advances from listeners. If someone comes up to the stage with a song request, there are ready made phrases to thwart them. Normally, you say something like, “The next song we’re going to play has some of the same notes in it as the one you want.” If someone comes up to the stage with a more Romantic type inquiry, the musicians code requires that you assess the situation and help your fellow musicians discourage the groupie when necessary. In 1999, in honor of the new millennium, we broke the rules.

It was a New Year’s Eve gig. Baker had booked a small combo to play for a community party in Masaryktown, Florida. The band was to be Baker on trumpet, sax, piano, bass, and drums. Baker didn’t have a bass player for the gig, so I suggested we use my good friend, the J-Dog. (See another adventure with the J-Dog here. Check out the J-Dog’s music here.) The directions were cryptic: Drive thirty miles beyond the city on a two-lane road until you see a flashing yellow light. Turn left.

J-Dog and I arrived almost simultaneously and started to unload gear. The Masaryktown Recreation Center was a one-story edifice that primarily consisted of a social hall with a kitchen. As I went through the front door, I noticed a flyer that read, “Next Week: Joltin’ Joe and the Bavarians! Annual Big Polka Night!” I turned around and incredulously asked J-Dog, “What kind of place is this?” The fake wood paneling that covered every square inch of wall answered my question. In addition to the usual “book” that Baker used for gigs, I noticed several extra scores with the word “Polka” lurking somewhere conspicuously in the title.

“Baker, are you really making us play polkas tonight?” I asked. “It’s New Year’s Eve!”
“They asked for polkas. We’re playing some polkas.” He replied coolly.
I immediately launched into my polka lecture. “My mom used to play polka’s on the accordion when we were little. You know the one thing I always loved about my mother’s playing? She never smiled when she played. Myron Florin always smiled when he played on Lawrence Welk, and my mom never did. I always thought that God had a special place in hell reserved for people who looked like they enjoyed playing that instrument. You know, I’ve raised my children with two rules. Number 1: I’ll support you in whatever you want to do as long as you don’t go into politics. Number 2: Never play the accordion and the banjo together because it’s a secret formula for conjuring up the devil.”
“Kurt, just play the polkas.” Baker replied while rolling his eyes.

And so we played polkas. As the crowd gathered to dance, Baker started a polka and made it progressively more exciting by continually pushing the tempo. His strategy worked well until the tempo reached a fervor that outstripped the median age of the dancers. The youngest people at the party were in their late fifties, and many looked to be considerably older. Eventually, the tempo got fast enough to knock and an old man down. The polka stopped while we waited to make sure that the man on the floor did not require medical attention. As I considered my own responsibility in the possible hospitalization of an audience member, I imagined the conversation with the doctor.
“What happened?”
“Well, we were dancing to a polka, and the band just kept playing faster and faster. I tried to keep up, and the next thing I knew, I was on my back on the floor with pains in my chest.”

There should be some sort of Fibonacci series or Pascalian triangle trick that would allow musicians to calculate safe tempos for dancing depending on the average age of the audience. Alas, most mathematicians are poor dancers and unconcerned with such matters. When the man was safely removed from the dance floor, we began a beguine. It was around this time that a woman approached the bandstand between tunes.

She appeared to be in her late fifties. Her hair looked like it was probably ten years older than she was. It was the blond color that comes from the most expensive bottles of dye that can be bought at a Masaryktown pharmacy. There was clearly an admiration for one of the Protestant Evangelical schools of hair styling. At first glance, it appeared to be the Southern Baptist school, but, as she got closer, the vertical gymnastics and frosted highlights belied a clear influence from the Pentecostal Avant Garde. Her make-up seemed to strike a playful balance between Gauguin’s bold use of color and Pollock’s thick textured abstractions. Someone had obviously accidentally spilled a box of sequins on her dress before the party, and she had neglected to remove them.

As she approached J-Dog, and I began to jockey for position. Each of us wanted to be the first to regurgitate one of the standard lines for song requests. The woman surprised us all, went straight toward Baker, pointed her finger at him and said in an inebriated drawl, “I’m having a shlow dansh wif you before thish night is over.” We were temporarily stunned when her request turned out to be of a non-musical nature. Baker made some excuse about not being able to dance while he was playing the trumpet, and we continued playing the set.

The breaks between sets are times for trading insults and telling stories. I also take time to meet the people playing the job if I’ve never worked with them. There was an older drummer on the gig in Masaryktown. He had been playing for so long that he had gigging stories for all situations. We began by discussing the poor man that Baker had knocked down with his polka tempo. The drummer began talking about a gig when he fell of the edge of a stage. Baker countered with a story of playing a gig where someone had an actual heart attack on the dance floor. The band leader on the gig immediately called “Sentimental Journey” as the paramedics were carting the man away on the gurney. I met the saxophonist whose name was Kip. Kip was blond haired, rather heavy set, and just seemed to like to play music. Capturing the dialogue of a set break is a little tricky when you are playing with a pick up band. It goes something like this:

Kurt: Hey, how many bassists does it take to change a light bulb?
J-Dog: How many?
Kip: Oh, I know this one.
Kurt: None. The piano player can do it with his left hand.
Baker: What do you want to play in the next set?
Kurt: I’d like to play some Monk.
Drummer: Me, too.
Kip: Do you know “Straight no chaser” in F?
Baker: Sure. What else do you want to play?
J-Dog: How about, “Baker no chase-her’ in A flat?”
Baker: Ha, ha.
Kurt: Do we have to play another polka?
Baker: Yes. We’re putting at least one polka in each set.
Kip: There was a polka I used to play…What was the name…Oh yeah! It’s called the “I’m having a slow dance with you before this night is over polka.” Do you know that one Baker?
Baker: Ha, ha, ha. Now listen guys, I’m not going to dance with that lady.
Kurt: Look at you! You’re an old man, and the ladies are still all about you.
J-Dog: She was a scary one though. When she asked, I thought of saying the “We don’t know that one” line, but I was too tongue-tied by her appearance.
Baker: Guys, I’m not going to dance with her.

We went back inside and played two more sets. The food was pretty good. Being Bavarian type food, it was many different shades of brown. One of the most important features of a good gig is the food. Sometimes you take certain jobs just for the cuisine that will be served. You also avoid certain jobs if you know they won’t let you eat. My general practice is to hide about five large ziplock bags in my case for carrying home food to the family. We ate our fill and played through “Auld lang syne” at midnight. We were supposedly going to finish at 12:30am. The woman had not been seen for two hours. Finally, at 12:20 or so, she emerged from the herd of polka dancers and sauntered up to the bandstand. It was apparent from her jaunty gait that she had continued sipping the sauce throughout the evening. We were all waiting in eager anticipation when she surprised us again. She bypassed the band, went to the edge of the stage and started unhooking some of the helium balloons. “I jush wanna get some balloonsh to take home wish me,” she mumbled. She had completely forgotten about her original proposition. I’m not sure if it was the Y2K scare or a run of the mill “wild hair,” but as she was walking away, Kip and I simultaneously decided to break the musicians code. There was a fantastic manifestation of the collective unconsciousness as two voices spoke in unison, “You didn’t get your slow dance yet!” There followed a grand pause. Baker turned around to give the two of us a scowl. The wheels in her mind, being thoroughly lubricated with vodka, began to crank. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m shupposed to have a shlow dansh wish you.”
“Guess you better pick a song, Baker.” J-Dog said.
“Crazy,” said Baker. “One chorus!”

What Baker was saying to us (in the specialized vocabulary of musicians) was “Play the Willie Nelson standard ‘Crazy’”. “One chorus” is a term whose etymology lies in the old tin-pan alley songs. There was always a verse that preceded the song itself. For many songs, jazz musicians simply skipped the verse and played the chorus. When you are on a gig in modern times, to play “one chorus” means to play the tune through one time. This is not the normal way a pick-up band would play a song. The normal format is to play the “head” or “chorus.” Immediately following the completion of “one chorus,” musicians then take turns soloing by improvising over the chord changes. After the improvising is finished, you play the “head” or “chorus” again. That night, the meaning was clear: Play “Crazy” by Willie Nelson through one time, don’t take any solos, and get me off of the dance floor as soon as possible. Baker, however, had made one fatal error. He had already given us our paychecks on the last break.

We played through one chorus of “Crazy.” When we came to the end, I turned to Kip and said, “Take a ride, Kip.” Kip improvised through one time, and when we reached the end again, I turned and said, “Go around again.” J-Dog began to laugh. The drummer began to laugh. Baker began making ugly faces at us each time he spun the woman’s back to the bandstand. When Kip wanted to laugh, he had to wait till we began the fourth full time through the chorus. Before he started chuckling too hard, he maintained his composure long enough to turn to me and say, “Go ahead, Kurt.” As I began my solo, Baker had already been dancing with the woman for 3 minutes. By the time it was Kip’s turn to say, “Go around again, Kurt.” Baker had lost his patience. We had already played the tune six times and the “head” was nowhere in sight. Baker’s ugly faces had turned into vehement physical gestures. He would spin the woman’s back to us, raise his hand to his throat and make the universal cut gesture. When we finally played the “head”, we made sure to play the “turn around” at the end four or five times to extend the ending of the song. “Crazy. One chorus” had become a 7 minute dance.
As we were packing up our gear, the banter started again.

Baker: You guys are real funny.
Kurt: It’s the least we could do to you for making us play all those polkas.
Kip: Did you get her number, Baker?
Baker: No. I didn’t get her number.
J-Dog: Hey, Kurt. You know what next week is?
Kurt: What’s that?
J-Dog: Annual Big Polka Night with Joltin’ Joe and the Bavarians.
Kip: What?
Kurt: Yeah. There’s a sign on the door.
J-Dog: Maybe we can show up and see Baker dancing with his girlfriend again.
Baker: Next time, I’m waiting until after the gig to pay you guys.

Aesthetics: St. Augustine and the training of beautiful artists

2011-12-30T13:09:00.004-06:00

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

2011-12-24T09:25:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-21T22:39:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-20T21:15:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-19T10:06:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-17T21:40:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-15T09:58:00.005-06:00

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

2011-12-08T21:41:00.002-06:00

(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

2011-12-06T22:41:00.002-06:00

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

2011-12-03T15:30:00.002-06:00

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.

The Crown Victoria Diaries Episode 3: Revenge of the Trash

2011-11-29T23:06:00.000-06:00

If you missed the rest, you can read them here:
Prequel
Episode 1
Episode 2

     The Crown Victoria served in appropriate fashion for a vehicle named after such a noble and prudish queen. Modesty was not always possible on the icy roads of Dallas. She would sometimes spin her royal self around till she was facing oncoming traffic. After a pause, she would compose herself and proceed in a more queenly manner – behaving as if it had all been part of her royal highness’ plan.

She had a penchant for attempting to travel about with random items on her roof. Countless forgotten coffee cups slid from the top of the car and were smashed to pieces in the parking lot. Books found themselves repeatedly crushed into the concrete of Skillman Highway by passing cars after attempting to ride on top of the queen. The only one that actually survived was a notebook that contained about three semesters worth of graduate school homework. The notebook had the good sense to ride on the hood instead of the roof. I noticed it shifting positions in the saddle when I was driving about 45 mph down the road. Fortunately, I was able to stop and retrieve it before it joined the ranks of the other books and coffee cups.

    Like all things Victorian, however, the whitewashed exterior hid an underside that was less than seemly. We drove the car back and forth from Dallas to Tampa several times, but never invested in the fermented motivational products that would have inspired our friends to help us clean it out. That is to say, there were objects in the car that had been at Billy Bob’s and had never been removed – even after two years. When we were preparing to move back to Florida, we found newspapers living as hermits in distant recesses of the car. They had gathered to reminisce about past events and compare headline size. In addition to the periodical eremites, several thousand new denizens from Texas had moved into the trunk, floorboards, seats, and back windowsill. It was not a clean car, but we didn’t realize exactly how dirty it was until we received the award.

    Our upstairs neighbors were Sammy and Ervin. They were from West Texas. Sammy was fittingly ample for a West Texan. Ervin was nice despite the conspicuous lack of a “G” on the end of his name. They had moved to the big city so that Ervin could work at the Texas Instruments Plant. Ervin’s daddy had worked at the plant, and Ervin’s daddy’s daddy had worked at the plant. So Ervin and Sammy decided that Ervin would work at the plant until they saved up enough money to buy a piece of property and a “double-wide” in West Texas. They had a little boy that was the same age as our oldest son. Zachariah had been speaking in full sentences for almost a year. Their son, Tyler, could only manage some indecipherable monosyllabic grunts that were related to his favorite television show, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. It wouldn’t have been that awkward except that when we were all together, Zachariah would say, “May we go outside and play?” and Tyler would say, “Mi…Mor…Pa…Ra…er!” Sammy would look at us in wonder and say, “Our boys are just so smart! They’re both little geniuses!” We would grin with chagrin saying, “Oh, yes. Yes.” To be fair to Sammy, Tyler very well could have been a genius by West Texas standards.
From the moment they moved in next door, Sammy and Ervin began asking us if we would like to go to the beach with them. Being in the middle of Texas, we assumed that they were using the word “beach” incorrectly.

“There isn’t a beach in Dallas. It’s landlocked.”
“No, no. We want y’all to come down to Lake Ray Hubbard with us.”
“Oh! A lake. That’s not a beach. We’re from Florida. We don’t swim in fresh water.”
That excuse allowed us to avoid “goin’ to the beach” for an entire year.

     After my graduation, we decided to move back to Tampa. We had a fresh grandchild for the free babysitters waiting in Florida. When we were sure of our plans for departure, we also made a final concession to the neighbor’s request. The West Texans and the Floridians drove to Lake Ray Hubbard with cooler and sunscreen in tow. Upon arrival, we began unloading the car. I had carried a cooler down to the “beach” and looked back toward our beloved Crown Vic to see Jennifer talking with two gentlemen. One fellow speaking to her was carrying a clipboard, and the other man had a camera around his neck. He was poking his head and camera into the open doors of the car. I found this very alarming as we normally kept the insides of the car away from prying eyes. As I approached, Jenn introduced me to Michael Precker and David Leeson from the Dallas Morning News. They were assigned the task of writing an article on the recent seatbelt recall that had taken place for Japanese-made cars. The Japanese automakers had basically said that there was nothing wrong with their seatbelts. The belts worked fine in Japan. The problem was, according to the Japanese car makers, that all the filthy Americans ate McDonalds in their cars and got French fries and sodas in the seatbelt receptacles causing them to malfunction. Michael and David thought they would head out to Lake Ray Hubbard on Memorial Day as part of their search to find the dirtiest car in Dallas for a newspaper story. We won the contest in a landslide victory. What most impressed the two reporters about our car was the quality of the garbage lurking around. Beethoven symphonies, literature, women’s studies material, and an analysis of Elliot Carter’s fourth string quartet were all swimming around with old newspapers, fast food bags, a large rock, a hand drawn sign that said “Dallas or Bust” (which we had hung as a self fulfilling property before our time spent with Billy Bob and Company), and a mountain of dirty clothes. The contrast of high-brow material with trash could only have been produced by two intellectuals living in an apartment complex full of Texans on welfare. They asked us a few questions and took a very large picture of me sitting in the front seat of the car. The picture showed me looking out over the top of my glasses wearing a T-shirt that was stained with furniture polish. My hands held a copy of the Beethoven symphonies and a collection of Maya Angelo poems. As a consolation prize, they awarded us one of those tree shaped air fresheners that you hang from your rearview mirror. A few days later, the huge picture of me was on the cover of the Today section of the Dallas Morning News. I have reprinted some excepts of the article below:

“As they cruise the roads of Texas, Jennifer Rosenblatt and Kurt Knecht would never think of littering, and we all should be grateful. That is because their car looks like a garage sale being held inside a trash bin. The trusty Crown Victoria brought the couple from Florida to Southern Methodist University two years ago, and they haven't cleaned it out since. There are generations of McDonald's wrappers and Slurpee cups, mounds of toys and crumpled clothes, last December's newspapers and unidentified reel-to-reel tapes. A big rock rests next to a symphonic score on the dashboard, while a Maya Angelou book and a shriveled banana peel share space under the back window. There is much, much more.
"You should see the trunk," says Ms. Rosenblatt with a smile as she pulls out a hat from the Container Store, where - honest to goodness - she used to work. Lest you think this is cause for family friction, listen to her husband:
"It's just a question of priorities," says Mr. Knecht, who just completed a master's in music composition. "An hour of cleaning out the car would mean one less hour to read a book or listen to Beethoven."
Whatever their opinions of Beethoven, millions of Americans would agree….
Clean machines
Besides the general penchant for cleanliness, Dr. McDougall has other explanations for the clean cars. Because of crowded roads and good public transportation, fewer Japanese commute by car. And because the government uses frequent inspections and high fees to discourage people from keeping old cars, he says, people tend to buy new ones more often.
"We tend to take care of new things more carefully," says Dr. McDougall, who has lived in Japan for 12 years. "I think that's very much the case here."
The director says his sister-in-law, who is Japanese, recently was in Boston and needed a taxi. When the car approached, she saw it was in less-than-great shape - and dirty.
"She refused to get in," Dr. McDougall says. "She thought it might really be dangerous."
By that reasoning, she may not even want to set foot in Dallas at all while that Crown Victoria is still around. The Rosenblatt/Knecht trashmobile seems immune to parents: "My mother told me I'm not a homeless waif, so why is my car like this?" Ms. Rosenblatt says. "When my mother-in-law came to visit, she got into the car and said “We're going to stop at the dumpster and throw all this away. Well, we didn't."
It is immune to friends and even occasional misgivings about the impact on 3-year-old Zachariah and 3-month-old Avi.
"When I see my son toss something on the floor I tell him we don't do that," she says. "He looks at me like, `What planet are you from?' "
Now and then, there are concessions.
"Usually there's only room for the driver," Ms. Rosenblatt says. "If we all want to go somewhere, I make him get up early and clean off enough of a section so we can all sit down."

I received a phone call at 7:30AM the day the article appeared. A voice said: “This is Charles Kuralt from CBS. We saw the article about the dirty car and would like to do a story about it on 60 Minutes.” I immediately recognized that the voice was not Charles Kuralt, but Dr. Martin Sweidel, the chair of the music department at SMU.
“Hi, Dr. Sweidel,” I responded after a brief pause.
“Oh, you recognized me. I saw the article,” he said sternly.
I then realized that they had mentioned that I was a recent graduate of Meadows School of the Arts and that this might not be the image that the administration wanted portrayed. Dirty cars are neither Southern nor Methodist. Finally, the tense silence was broken, “Congratulations, son! You done us proud! We’re putting a copy in your permanent file.”

    I began to wonder about how many other people had actually seen and read the article. The day continued, as most of them seem to do, and we found ourselves to be the brunt of much teasing. I would show up to a rehearsal and people would surreptitiously pull out copies of the paper and laugh. Our parents all received copies of the paper which caused more dismay.
We were late on the rent that month, so I went down to speak with the apartment complex manager about an extension. “Listen, we are getting ready to move to Tampa, and this will be our last month. Would it be possible for you to wait a few days before we turn in the rent?”
“We really don’t make excep – Hey! I know you! You’re that guy with the dirty car, right? I read that article in the paper the other day. I couldn’t believe it was true!”
“About the rent?”
“Do you really have the Beethoven symphonies and a banana peal?”
“Yes, it was the only time we ever went to the ‘beach’ here in Dallas.”

    When we finally sold the Crown Vic, we cleaned her up, threw the rock in the dumpster, and drove her down to school where the transaction was to take place. I think we sold it for $300.00 which was the amount needed for food and gas for the trip to Florida. When we met the buyer, we said, “This car is famous you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It once won a contest for being the dirtiest car in Dallas. They wrote a newspaper article about it.”
“This was that car! I read that article! You were the people in that article! Well it looks clean now.”

    And so it was under the shade of the oaks on the SMU campus that we finally said good-bye to the Crown Victoria. My father had given us one of his old work vans. After seeing the newspaper article, he asked us to be sure to remove the company logo as soon as possible. The van was in comparably good mechanical health. It had never had its stomach pumped because of swallowing too much diesel fuel. The principle defect that a work van presented to a young family was the lack of a back seat for the kids. Our mechanics in Tampa informed us that due to its design as a work vehicle, it would be impossible to install a normal back seat. However, they felt sure that if we could salvage the front seat of a pick-up truck from a junkyard that they would be able to bolt it to the floor. The Feng Shui aesthetic from Alexandria, Louisiana had finally managed to migrate from Billy Bob’s genius to the back seat of our van. When the seat was finally in place, it became a lasting prophetic warning: always check the color of the dispenser before you pump the gasoline.

Ford Crown Victoria: Episode Two - how a stranger almost gave birth in our car

2011-11-26T20:35:00.000-06:00

The Crown Victoria made her second attempt for fifteen minutes of fame some months later. After learning that a member of their family had married someone who had filled a car full of diesel fuel, Jennifer’s grandparents came to make sure everything was OK. Jennifer’s mother had come up for what might be called a “follow-up” visit. We were living in an apartment complex on Skillman Avenue in Dallas. It was (generously speaking) one step up from the ghetto. The residents included ex-cons, drug dealers, and a few students. We all got along, and when we didn’t, the cops made regular visits – occasionally with their helicopters – to ensure that the peace was being kept. We had been out and about with Jennifer’s mother, and we returned to our apartment in the evening.

As we were walking her up to our pad, I was met by a 6’ 7’’ African American man with glasses who reminded me a little of Kareem Abdul Jabar.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello.”
“Are you moving in downstairs?” I asked.
“Yes.”
After the brief and portentous encounter, we went upstairs to our place and spent the evening retelling stories of our car’s trip(s) to the repair shop(s) in Louisiana. The next day we toured around Dallas some more and returned home again. That evening, there was a knock at the door around 10:45PM. I opened the door to find Kareem in a state of noticeable excitement. I looked up his tall frame, and words began rapidly pouring out of his mouth onto my head. “My name is Derrick. I know you don’t know me, but you’re the only one here who’s even said ‘hello’ to me. My wife Alicia is getting ready to have our baby, and we don’t have a car. Is there any way you could take us to the hospital?”

    We ran into the bedroom and asked Jenn’s mother the type of question that became typical of our married life together. “Can you watch Zachariah while we take two strangers to the hospital? This guy’s wife is getting ready to deliver her baby.” She agreed, and we ran downstairs to the car. Alicia (whom I had not previously had the pleasure of meeting) was clearly in labor. Derrick helped Alicia into the passenger seat. She maintained a grateful disposition despite being in very apparent discomfort. The back seat was full of junk that had remained unpacked after the move. Jennifer made room for herself by pushing the debris to the side. The only space left in the car for Derrick was a small area of the bench seat between his very pregnant wife and I. In my estimation, approximately three feet and seven inches of Derrick’s six feet seven inches was torso, leaving four feet of legs. Since he was bipedal, we had to fit a driver, a pregnant lady, Derrick, and eight feet of Derrick’s legs into the front seat of the car. We skipped over the formal introductions and sped off as quickly and indirectly as possible. Derrick’s legs were everywhere. There were legs on the dashboard, on both floorboards, on the seat, and some seemed to be up around the rear view mirror.

The hospital was only about fifteen minutes to the West if you knew the correct route. Derrick didn’t know the correct route. Derrick knew the forty-five minute route. Derrick and Alicia had just moved to our apartment complex from Oak Cliff on the Southwest side of Dallas. We were all the way on the Northeast side of the city. Derrick only knew how to get to the hospital from Oak Cliff. Instead of taking the expedient route down Central, Derrick took us further away from the hospital toward the East. We picked up Interstate-635 - the loop that travels around Dallas and Ft. Worth. I-635 is the “Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway.”   We followed LBJ south until the loop bent west and exited near Oak Cliff almost thirty minutes later. We then turned right and headed East again to make it to the hospital.

A diary of Kurt’s thought process on the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway
10:50PM – How weird is it that we are driving strangers to the birth of their child!
10:51PM - I remember watching Jennifer in labor when Zachariah was born.
10:53PM - Alicia seems to be handling the contractions well.
10:54PM - She doesn’t scream like Jennifer.
10:55PM – Is it ironic that we are on Lyndon B. Johnson’s Interstate, and we don’t know where          we are going?
10:56PM - “MMMMMMMMMMM”
10:56PM - That was weird. Alicia just let out a guttural moan. That was a contraction. She just had a contraction.
10:57PM - It didn’t even seem to hurt her that much.
10:58PM – I’m not sure “ironic” is the right word. People have been lost following Lyndon Johnson before.
10:59PM - It’s almost like a small tremor begins traveling along the fault line of her body.
11:00PM - Alicia gradually shakes more and more until the magma finds its way to the surface in a primordial cry of “MMMMMMMMM.”
11:01PM – I bet Billy Bob never thought this car would go 80mph again.
11:02PM - Man that guy has some long legs.
11:03PM - They’re blocking part of the view out the back window.
11:04PM – This route to the hospital is very circuitous.
11:05PM – I never get to use the word circuitous in casual conversation.
11:06PM – Lyndon B. Johnson was circuitous when he was trying to explain how he faked the incidents of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
11:07PM - This is very different than Jennifer’s labor.
11:08PM - This is something more earthy and ancient.
11:09PM - It’s like mother earth is giving birth next to me.
11:10PM – Maybe “fitting” is the right word.
11:11PM – It’s not really ironic to be lost following Lyndon Johnson.
11:12PM - Who are these people and what am I doing racing at 85mph with them in a car?
11:13PM – Man, that dude has some long legs.
11:14PM –Derrick just suggested that I turn on my hazard lights.
11:15PM –Everyone already drives 85mph on the Interstate in Dallas. What will the hazards do?
11:16PM – Are those legs that are blocking my hand from the hazard lights?
11:17PM- Only in Texas would I be driving at 85mph with my hazards on in the slow lane because of all the people that are passing me on the left.
11:18PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMM,” hmmm, another contraction.
11:19PM - How is that man next to me on the seat making it past his own legs to put his hand on her? His legs are covering part of the dashboard.
11:20PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM” Another contraction. That one was longer.
11:21PM - I remember when Jenn had Zachariah. It was really intense when her contractions were only two minutes apart.
11:22PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:23PM - TWO MINUTES APART! HOLY S*%T! THIS WOMAN IS GOING TO GIVE BIRTH IN MY CAR!
11:23PM - The accelerator is touching the floor! The car is at 95mph.
11:24PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:25PM - That’s cool, I’m actually flooring a car and keeping the pedal down.
11:26PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:27PM - I once pushed my old Nova over 100mph in high school.
11:28PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:29PM - That was when I worked at the grocery store with that kid, what was his name?
11:30PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:31PM - Oh yeah. Steve.
11:32PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:33PM - I never really liked Steve.
11:34PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:35PM - How can his legs be on the floor and on the front window at the same time?
11:36PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM” HOLY S*!T!
11:37PM - Please, God, let us make it to the hospital.
11:38PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:39PM - The floorboards aren’t even cleaned.
11:40PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:41PM - I hope it’s not one of those meconium babies. The velure seats will be ruined.
11:42PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:43PM - We don’t have any hot water or towels.
11:44PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMM”
11:45PM - Why do they do that in the movies. I’ve seen a baby being born, and they never used hot water or towels.
11:46PM - “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM” 11:47PM - O God, please hold this woman’s child inside her body until we get to the hospital.

    Around this time, Derrick brought me back to reality by recognizing a street. After a few more turns, we arrived at the hospital. Jennifer jumped out and grabbed a nurse who quickly brought a wheelchair for Alicia. They took her inside, and the baby was born immediately. About thirty minutes later, Derrick was sharing a cigar with me outside in the parking lot.
“It’s a boy!” he said. “I’ve named him Delantrius.”
“Wow! Is that some sort of Latin name?”
“No. It’s after me and my friends. The ‘De’ is for Derrick. ‘Lan’ is for my friend ‘Lonnie’. The ‘Tr’ is for my friend Trey. The ‘Trius’ is for, like, the ‘three of us’, so ‘trius’. Delantrius.”
“Well, that’s kind of cool,” I said. I thought to myself that it was a good thing Lonnie wasn’t named Shiloh because then Derrick would have named his son “Deshitrius”.
“So,” Derrick continued, “the doctor said if we had been five minutes later, then the baby would have been born in the car.” After I offered my congratulations again, Derrick and I spent some time actually doing more formal introductions.

Following our initial escapade, Derrick, Alicia, Jennifer, and I became fast friends. Zachariah loved Derrick too. If he ever dropped a toy off the balcony of our apartment, he could retrieve it by screaming, “DERRIIIIICK!!!!!!” The giant 6’7” man would emerge from his cave below, reach down on the ground, and hand the toy up a full story through the guardrail.

Becoming friends with someone after you have driven them to the hospital for their child’s delivery is like a Chinese shar-pei. There is something not quite right about it. A fast emotional bond was established between the four of us before we really knew each other’s names, and it hung around like the extra skin on a dog’s head. Our first double date was the mad drive to the hospital. This probably explains the development of our continued service as taxi drivers. Within a few months, I was getting up at around 4:30AM to take Derrick to work in Ft. Worth. I would arrive back to the bedroom at around 6:00AM, sleep for an hour, and get up to start the day. Eventually we lost contact with them. It was strange. We were very close to Derrick and Alicia for our stay in Dallas, but didn’t keep in touch when they moved to an apartment complex a few blocks away. I probably shouldn’t have hoped for more. Relationships that are begun on the seats of a car seldom last.

Ford Crown Victory: Episode One - The Phantom Mechanic

2011-11-21T22:12:00.003-06:00

(If you missed the prequel, you can read it here.)

We had no idea how famous the car would become when we took it from my grandmother’s driveway. After two years of living in Dallas, complete strangers would recognize us as “that couple with the car.” In my imagination, I attempt to recreate the first day we drove the car. I picture the interior of the vehicle and scan for some feature that would set the car apart. When I encounter greatness, I am always looking for some kind of weird birthmark. You can point out the brownish skin and say, “Aha! I don’t have the birthmark like she does. That’s why I’m not great.” In the case of this vehicle, there were no distinguishing characteristics. When two uncommon people fail miserably in their attempt to live a common life, there is usually a portent at the beginning of the story.

Would that it could have been a mystical experience! I wish that some bangle-armed, turban-headed lady with warts had pulled me aside at a carnival and whispered, “When you drive the car that has a coffee stain on the back seat in the shape of the Virgin Mary’s head, you will become famous for a week in Dallas, Texas.” It wasn’t like that. It was just a car, and we were just a recently married couple. The car, however, had different ideas, and it catapulted us into notoriety. The 1984 Ford Crown Victoria eventually became a car of legend, and we were taken along for the ride. In this, the Crown Vic’s first adventure, one can already spot the raw talent the car had for placing itself into the type of situations where it might make a name for itself

In 1993, I was accepted to Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University as a candidate for the Masters Degree in Music Composition. I used to play this gig in the summertime called the Broadway Theatre Project for Ann Reinking. At the end of three weeks of playing the piano ten hours a day, the accompanists would get a check for $1500.00. At the time, Jenn and I thought that $1500.00 was a mad pile of cash, so we devised a plan:
1 – Bribe friends to help
2 – Get them to help us clean out our place
3 – Place most of our belongings in storage
4 – Pack the barest necessities into the Crown Victory that my grandmother had given us
5 – Drive to Dallas
6 – Rent an apartment with $1500.00 and no jobs
7 – Pay rent with student loan money
Everything went according to plan. The friends descended and cleaned with a Dionysian fury, the kind of which can only be fueled by a twelve pack of beer. The majority of our belongings were placed in storage to be shipped to Dallas. The rest were forced into the car like cream cheese seeking out every nook and cranny of a bagel. The trunk was filled. Zachariah was seventeen months old at the time. We placed his car seat in the center of the back seat, and filled the back window with books that completely blocked any chance of seeing with the rearview mirror. On either side of Zachariah, the car was so filled from floor to ceiling that the installation and removal of a child was like a spelunking adventure. The area between driver and passenger was filled, as well as floor space on both sides of the back seat. A cooler was placed on the passenger floor so that whoever was not driving kept their legs up high. Having accustomed myself to the “high leg” style of passenger riding in the Rabbit, I felt well prepared for the Crown Vic’s maiden voyage.

We set out for “Big D” with the sorrow of leaving our friends and the excitement of a road trip rolling around the inside of the car like clouds inside a Volkswagen Rabbit. We meandered up Interstate 75 out of Tampa, and picked up Interstate 10 to start the trek Westward. After a brief respite at the rest area outside of Lafayette, Louisiana, we achieved Interstate 49 and began to wander North. At the time, Interstate 49 was not completed. We had to exit on one side of Alexandria, drive through the city, and pick up the Interstate on the other side. We took a wrong turn and passed the Interstate. After reorienting ourselves, we decided to fill our rather parched gas tank before the final leg of the trip to Dallas. We had made excellent time and were going to reach Dallas by the late afternoon after leaving the day before. With the gas tank filled, we pulled out of the station and headed along the road. We picked up Interstate 49 again, and drove the last leg of the trip.

Actually, the car rolled out of the gas station about 10 feet and died. I attempted to revive it by restarting it in a manner that resembled a Volkswagon Rabbit making a right hand turn. The engine struggled to come alive, turning over again and again to no avail. More defibrillations only showed that the patient needed the expertise of a doctor that was more experienced than myself. By good fortune, we had a membership in AAA auto club, so after a phone call, the nice lady assured us that a man from “Billy Bob’s” would be over to help us restart our car. The sun was bearing down on us at approximately nine thousand miles per hour. So, we reached into the bowels of the backseat and removed Zachariah from the cave-like structure of belongings that we had created for him. With the toys deep in the trunk, we had few choices for entertaining a seventeen-month-old child. Jenn saw a ditch lying on the side of the road in the Louisiana heat. We picked it up and used it to distract our child as the heat continued its unrelenting pursuit. True to the words we had heard from the operator, a tow truck pulled up within thirty minutes. “Billy Bob’s Tow Trucking” was air brushed on the side of the vehicle in the style of a 70s license plate that you would put on the front of your car for a test of your existential freedom. Emerging from the truck was a rather tall and ample gentleman wearing the traditional uniform of the auto repairman. His name patch bore the moniker “Billy Bob” in sewing machine cursive. Not only did we get prompt service, Billy Bob himself had come into the hot Louisiana sun to rescue two college students. I re-entered the sweltering vehicle while Billy Bob placed himself in front of the hood and began poking around. Once again, we charged the defibrillator and attempted to resurrect the patient. After several attempts, Billy Bob realized that the patient was in more serious condition than his initial diagnoses suggested.

“Wull, tsgot far,” said he in a thick Louisiana drawl. I was unfamiliar with the language that he spoke. It sounded like English to a degree, but it was an English into which someone had crashed a car. The victim survived, but her vowels were all mutilated, and her consonants had been crushed together. “’Tsgot fyooel.” “Fuel!” I thought to myself. That word sounds the same in Louisianaian and in the English that I know. OK. He’s saying, “It’s got fuel…and…It’s got fire!” He’s talking about electricity and gas. And again, he repeated his mantra, “’Tsgot far. ‘Tsgot fuel. Ah don’ know why it ain’t startin’. Ah’m gonna hafta tow it to mah shop.” Despite his swift arrival and kind demeanor, the heat had already melted through the thin layer of patience we had been wearing. Reluctantly, we handed him the keys to the Crown Vic, and moved cautiously past the air-brushed sign. We crammed ourselves into the passenger seat of Billy Bob’s truck and ventured to his shop with the Crown Vic in tow.

Billy Bob’s “shop” was more of a junkyard with a building in it than a traditional automotive repair facility. He towed the car toward the building through the surrounding forest of long dead Fords. We were not very encouraged when the waiting area was neither air-conditioned nor furnished. Actually, it was furnished in a manner that I could only guess was the product of Billy Bob’s own genius. In place of the traditional orange nagahide couch that accompanies the burnt coffee and reruns of Oprah in most garage waiting areas, Billy Bob had taken an interior-decorating page from the organic architectural school. He rescued the front seat from one of the pickup trucks resting in the junkyard. The seat was bolted it to the floor of the waiting area to create a “couch” for his guests. The seatbelts were left intact. It was everything I had imagined a Louisiana junkyard would look like when I was a youth (with the possible exception of the lack of air conditioning). After making sure that Jennifer and Zachariah were buckled into the couch, I stepped outside to search out Billy Bob. I found that a fascinating one-act play was being rehearsed in front of our Crown Victoria.

NO EXIT

A COMEDY AND A PHILOSOPHY

PERSONS REPRESENTED:

Billy Bob – a middle-aged automotive mechanic who has gained the respect of his peers by rising through the ranks of the other Louisiana automotive mechanics to own his own junkyard.

Bobby Joe – though slightly younger than Billy Bob in real life, he seems to be older. He has been wizened by years of country wisdom and southern folklore. Bobby Joe functions as the philosopher of the group. His role is not insight, but commentary.

Willy John– a slightly younger man who actively investigates problems and offers diagnoses which are always slightly off the mark. Willy is hoping to own his own junkyard one day.

Cooter (a mime) – Though Cooter is a non-speaking role, it is perhaps the most physically demanding. Cooter is a nervous type who is always scampering around the action. He constantly offers new perspectives but only communicates through physical gesture.

The scene is a hot Louisiana junkyard. In front of a makeshift garage and office, a Ford Crown Victoria is collecting dust. Billy Bob, Bobby Joe, and Willy John are standing in front of the car with the hood raised. Cooter is running around the car and crawling underneath the vehicle every thirty seconds or so. He usually (but not always) emerges with a glass of gasoline which he has managed to collect by a method known only to himself. When the gasoline is obtained, Cooter sniffs it very carefully and makes a contorted face. He then pours it vehemently on the ground only to disappear under the car again.

Billy Bob: Ah don’ know why it ain’t startin’

Bobby Joe: Mmmm

Willy John: D’s it got far?

Billy Bob: Yup. ‘Tsgot far. Try it.

At this point, Willy John attempts to turn the key while Cooter runs up to the front of the car and plays with a screwdriver in the area of the battery. After a great spark emerges causing Cooter to leap and drop the screwdriver, he scampers away to hide under the car again.

Billy Bob: See. ‘Tsgot far.

Bobby Joe: Mmmmmm. Yup.

Willy John: Wull. D’s it got fuel?

Here Cooter performs his fuel ritual and all look on until he pours the last bit out in offering to the junkyard gods.

Billy Bob: See. ‘Tsgot fuel.

Bobby Joe: Yup. Mmmmmmm.

Billy Bob: (as if saying a mantra) ‘Tsgot far, and ‘tsgot fuel. I don’ know why it ain’t startin’

Bobby Joe: Mmmmmmm.

Willy John: You sure it’s got far?

Billy Bob: Yup. ‘Tsgot far. Try it.

This time Billy Bob attempts to start the car, and Willy John watches until Cooter again shocks himself with the screwdriver.

Bobby Joe: Yup

Willy John: You sure it’s got fuel?

Cooter again performs the fuel ritual

Billy Bob: ‘Tsgot far, and ‘tsgot fuel. Ah don’ know why it ain’t startin’

At this point, the play should be repeated over and over again for approximately two to four hours in order to recreate what happened that day.

Jennifer and I had already made our obligatory phone calls to the family to let them know our car had broken down. With our hopes of getting back on the road waning, I left the play rehearsal to find Jenn and Zach. They were attempting to stay cool on the front seat of the Ford pick-up truck in the office. There is nothing like relaxing on a car seat after a twelve-hour drive. After Jennifer and I discussed the situation, I went back out to Billy Bob. Billy Bob was by this time deep in his trance and continually repeating the mantra, “’Tsgot far, and ‘tsgot fuel. Ah don’ know why it ain’ startin’.” What does the auto mechanic do when he can’t figure out a problem? Does he wait until Saturday morning and call Tom and Ray Magliozzi on Car Talk? I’m not so sure that Billy Bob had ever heard of National Public Radio, but he did have a solution. He said, “Ah’m goin’ ta call mah frien’ Fred to come ovah heah at five. Fred’sa certifah’d mechanic. He used to work at the Ford plant.”

Certified! The word resounded in my ear. Certified! “Certified is good,” I said to myself begging the question how one comes to be a AAA approved tow truck man without any qualifications except a truck with an air brushed sign. I was also excited to meet someone who had been baptized with a single Christian name. Fred had not only escaped the ubiquitous
bi-nominal theorem to which most of the parents of Louisiana auto-mechanics subscribe, but he had also managed to obtain “certification” of some sort or other. Thus it was that we waited. We continued to watch them rehearse the play (taking special pleasure in Cooter’s antics) until Fred arrived.

When Fred finally took the podium in front of our beleaguered car, he brought the commanding presence of a Toscannini or a Stokowski. Billy Bob and Willy John remained in awed silence as the master began to sense the technical deficiencies of the mechanical ensemble. Bobby Joe continued to pulsate approval and commentary with “Mmmmmm’s” and “Yup’s” as if the change in leadership had no affect on the situation. I like to think that Bobby Joe and I are similar in some ways. I’m quite sure that when I turn the key in my car that there is some inexorable logical process that causes the entire ensemble to play together in one harmonious action. However, there also seems to be a mystical element involved. I once read about a French woman who lived over a hundred years drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. I’ve known cars like that lady, though none of them were French cars. Why does a belt wear out on one day and not another? Why does a carburetor run out of carbs on Tuesday instead of Wednesday? The answers seem to be part of some cosmic process rather than the second law of thermodynamics. Cars make Calvinists of us all. “Mmmmmm. Yup.”

After an hour or so of diagnosing errors, the Louisiana sun was crawling off toward some swamp or other, and we realized that Dallas would have to wait for the morning. Entertaining a seventeen month old child for several hours with only a pick-up truck seat as a toy was no small feat. We almost wished we had brought the ditch along. Fred offered to take us to the Motel 6 when he realized that he would not finish the car that evening. We entered Fred’s car, and after Fred had removed us from the junkyard and entered the safety of the road, he turned to us and said in a reluctant tone, “Them boys back there ain’t so bright.” Of course, this observation made me want to ask Fred whether or not he was merely “certified” as a Master of all things Obvious. Fred, however, was nice and offering help, so I refrained. “I’ll go back there and help them for a while, but I have to get home. I also have to work tomorrow. I might be able to help them again later.” Fred dropped us off at the Motel 6, and we began spending money we didn’t have. Long distance phone calls to family. A night in a motel. Fast food. There was little to do aside from distracting ourselves with HBO and waiting for the morning.

Morning came, and after more fast food, we made a telephone call to Billy Bob to investigate his progress. Billy Bob was still working (now without the aid of Fred), but he could not point to a specific problem. They had replaced a few of the parts that Fred had pointed out as faulty during his tenure as director. Another bad HBO movie and more junk food passed. I phoned my father again. He said, “They’ve had the vehicle for almost twenty four hours and can’t tell you what’s wrong with it. You don’t know any mechanics there in Alexandria. Tell them to take it to the Ford dealership. At least you know that they’ll diagnose and fix the problem even if it is more expensive. You’ll at least be able to get back on the road.” So, we spoke once again to Billy Bob, and he could not reveal any progress. We said, “Tow it to the Ford dealership.” Billy Bob only charged us for the parts that he replaced and not the labor. The parts were another two or three hundred dollars that we did not have to give. We called the Ford dealership to inform them that we had switched our allegiance from “Billy Bob’s Tow Trucking” to Ford. The Ford mechanics told us they would be happy to help us and would begin work on our car first thing in the morning. So we hunkered down for another night of punishment. A bad 80s movie was blowing in from the west on the television followed by light showers of sitcom re-runs. We began to get that feeling that you get when you live in a motel, watch HBO movies, and survive on fast food. By this time, we had spent close to $500.00 in parts, motel bills, and junk food. What we had originally thought to be a “mad pile of cash” turned out to be more “mad” than “pile”, and our three day lifestyle was pumping quarters into the slot machine of a low budget gambling cruise.
I remember waking up a little late the next day. I remember that the phone rang at 12:15pm, and I remember the laughter. I was across the room, and when Jennifer answered the phone, I could hear the man laughing across Louisiana telephone wires. The conversation, as it was reported to me, went something like this:
“Um, Missz Ro-zen-blatt?”
“Yes, this is Jennifer Rosenblatt.”
“Um, Ma’am, ‘bout how far’d you get from that gas station? Twenty feet?”
“Um…No…About ten feet…Why?”
“You were pert darn near empty weren’t ya?”
“Yes, why?”
“Ma’am, this car was fulla diesel fuel. It don’ run on diesel. It only runs on unleaded gasoline.”

Actually, the transcription of the conversation does not include the uproarious laughter that was interspersed between all of the mechanic’s comments. The laughter could be heard across the room where I was standing paralyzed by the terrifying visage that had become Jennifer’s face. When called upon, Jennifer has a great gift for stringing together degrading phrases, and upon hearing the news, there followed the usual barrage of “I can’t believe you’re such an idiotic – doltish – buffoonish – can’t live in the real worldish – I mean, who fills an empty tank full of diesel – that’s why they put the green handle on it” phrases. Of course, the string of insults was summarily repeated during the subsequent phone calls to our respective parents.

My final punishment was like a medieval rite. I exited the courtesy van that we had taken from the Motel 6 and was led through the town of Hixson Auto Plex Ford for my walk of shame. I could see mechanics crawling out from underneath cars to catch a glimpse of the offender. Suppressed giggling was rampant while they pointed out the city boy to each other. The keys to the Crown Vic were handed over with complimentary smirks from men who could barely contain their laughter. They explained how they had to pump out an entire gas tank, flush the engine, and change all the spark plugs and filters. The gallows were fastened over my neck with the words, “Now, Sir, you know this car ain’t gonna run on diesel fyool. You gotta pump unleaded gasoline in it.” Somewhere in the process we wound up talking to Billy Bob on the phone again. Jennifer had the opportunity once again to recount to fresh ears the idiocy of her new husband. Billy Bob claimed that the thought of diesel fuel had crossed his mind (“Mmmmm. Yup.”). I just smiled thinking of how Cooter stole the show by sniffing the gasoline (I mean diesel).
I still contend that by some freak of nature, diesel fuel actually managed to find its way out of an unleaded nozzle. Jennifer argues that if, in fact, a regular pump was dispensing diesel fuel, the other cars which fueled at the pump after us while we were waiting for Billy Bob would have also gone ten feet and stalled. I maintain that as part of a random cosmic process, the diesel fuel only came out of the regular pump for our car. Whatever the reason, my one endeavor to do a chemistry experiment on a Ford Crown Victoria with an empty gas tank caused us to spend about $1000.00 more than we had to spare. We drove the rest of the day and arrived that evening in Mesquite, Texas, just outside of Dallas proper. Feeling the need for some sense of constancy in our lives, we checked into the Motel 6.

Mathilde who liked to sing Schubert and who also liked to put strange things in her ears: a cautionary tale

2011-11-17T19:14:00.002-06:00

Part the first (in which we learn about Mathilde's gifts and eccentricities)

Part the second (An die Musik)

Part the third (Der Lindenbaum)

Part the fourth (Heidenröslein)

Part the fifth (Der Tod und Das Mädchen)

(Here is a link to the translation if you need it)

The latest youtube video of Manly Men from Albright College

2011-11-11T16:37:00.003-06:00

Pretty funny version of my Manly Men's Chorus popped up on youtube. This time it's Albright College in Pennsylvania. Nice videography. What's the story with the one guy that's dressed differently? You can watch it here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins Song Cycle

2011-11-10T13:13:00.006-06:00

This is a song cycle that was originally written for my friend Carrie Kirby. It was an absolute delight to finally have an opportunity to perform it with her. There is almost no poet so far ahead of his time in terms of modern sensibility and rhythm as Hopkins. I selected three poems for this cycle. The first is a description of a waterfall in Scotland. In the second, Hopkins finds profound analogies for life while watching a young girl cry about leaves falling from trees. The final poem is Hopkins' expansion of a verse from the prophet Jeremiah. It's wonderful complaining about why everything goes so easily for stupid, immoral people.

3 poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I. Inversnaid


THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth	5
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,	10
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;	15
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. II. Spring and Fall: to a young child


MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older	5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:	10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

III. Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.


THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,	5
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again	10
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Carl Sandburg Song Cycle

2011-11-08T13:10:00.008-06:00

The next post from the Knecht&Kirby concert is my Sandburg cycle.

I have enjoyed Carl Sandburg's poetry since it was suggested to me in 9th grade by friend Kevin Boyd. This set of 5 songs is about 5 years old now. I appropriately wrote it over the move to Cornhusker country. There is something about his poetry that is at once humorous and very serious - like all good things. After showing one setting to a composition teacher, he said, "I don't know if I'm supposed to laugh or cry." I responded, "That's exactly what I was attempting." Incidentally, the "Grieg" movement accompaniment was composed completely by reassembling different Grieg motives out of context.

5 POEMS BY CARL SANDBURG

I. THE HANGMAN AT HOME

WHAT does the hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a
Plate of ham and eggs, do they ask	5
Him if it was a good day’s work
And everything went well or do they
Stay off some topics and talk about
The weather, base ball, politics
And the comic strips in the papers	10
And the movies? Do they look at his
Hands when he reaches for the coffee
Or the ham and eggs? If the little
Ones say, Daddy, play horse, here’s
A rope—does he answer like a joke:	15
I seen enough rope for today?
Or does his face light up like a
Bonfire of joy and does he say:
It’s a good and dandy world we live
In. And if a white face moon looks	20
In through a window where a baby girl
Sleeps and the moon gleams mix with
Baby ears and baby hair—the hangman—
How does he act then? It must be easy
For him. Anything is easy for a hangman,	25
I guess. II. MONOTONE

THE MONOTONE of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,	5
Bannered with fire and gold.

A face I know is beautiful—
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain. III. PERSONALITY: MUSINGS OF A POLICE REPORTER IN THE IDENTIFICATION BUREAU

You have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.

You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only one thumb.

You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and win all the world's honors, but when you come back home the print of the one thumb your mother gave you is the same print of thumb you had in the old home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.

Out of whirling womb of time comes millions of men

and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers' throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.

Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the inside story of this.

IV. GRIEG BEING DEAD

Grieg being dead we may speak of him and his art.

Grieg being dead we can talk about whether he was any good or not.

Grieg being with Ibsen, Björnson, Lief Ericson and the rest,

Grieg being dead does not care a hell's hoot what we say.

Morning, Spring, Anitra's Dance,

He dreams them at the doors of new stars.

V. BLACK HORIZONS

Black horizons, come up.

Black horizons, kiss me.

That is all; so many lies; killing so cheap;

babies so cheap; blood, people so cheap; and

land high, land dear; a speck of the earth

costs; a suck at the tit of Mother Dirt so

clean and strong, it costs; fences, papers,

sheriffs; fences, laws, guns; and so many

stars and so few hours to dream; such a big

song and so little a footing to stand and

sing; take a look; wars to come; red rivers

to cross.

Black horizons, come up.

Black horizons, kiss me.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

2011-11-06T23:52:00.016-06:00

When Carrie Kirby and I were in our early discussions of repertoire for our concert, I immediately asked her to look at my setting of Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of looking at a Blackbird. I wrote the music almost 10 years ago, but I've never been able to convince anyone that it was worthy of performance. In fact, several people suggested exactly otherwise. I remained convinced of the music. To my great delight, several people came up to me after the concert to tell me that it was their favorite piece of the evening. That's a great lesson for a composer. Given the limitations of my technical ability, it became necessary for me to split this into 13 parts. It was performed as one piece.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Rilke Song Cycle

2011-11-03T00:01:00.009-05:00

Here is the first of several posts from my concert with my good friend Carrie Kirby. Some time ago, Carrie suggested I take a look at Rilke's Stundenbuch as a possible source for texts. It is a wonderful set of poems written from the perspective of a Medieval monastic. I chose five of them for this song cycle. I am especially thankful for Dr. John Bailey and Gabriella Praetzel for corrections and suggestions to my translations.

I. Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,

die sich über die Dinge ziehn.

Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,

aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,

und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;

und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm

oder ein großer Gesang.

I live my life in widening rings

that expand over all things.

I may not complete the last one,

but I will attempt it.

I circle around God, around the ancient tower,

and I circle for thousands of years:

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,

or a great song.

II. Du, Nachbar Gott

Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manchesmal

in langer Nacht mit hartem Klopfen störe, -

so ists, weil ich dich selten atmen höre

und weiß: Du bist allein im Saal.

Und wenn du etwas brauchst, ist keiner da,

um deinem Tasten einen Trank zu reichen:

Ich horche immer. Gib ein kleines Zeichen.

Ich bin ganz nah.

Nur eine schmale Wand ist zwischen uns,

durch Zufall; denn es könnte sein:

ein Rufen deines oder meines Munds –

und sie bricht ein

ganz ohne Lärm und Laut…

You, neighbor God, if I sometimes disturb you in the long night with hard knocking, -

it is because I seldom hear you breathe and know:

You are alone in the room.

And if you need something, there is no one there to put a drink within your reach.

I am always listening. Give a small sign. I am always near.

Only a thin wall is between us,

through chance; it could be:

a call from your mouth or mine -

and it collapses without a noise or sound.

III. Ich glaube an Alles noch nie Gesagte

Ich glaube an Alles noch nie Gesagte.

Ich will meine frömmsten Gefühle befrein.

Was noch keiner zu wollen wagte,

wird mir einmal unwillkürlich sein.

Ist das vermessen, mein Gott, vergieb.

Aber ich will dir damit nur sagen:

Meine beste Kraft soll sein wie ein Trieb,

so ohne Zürnen und ohne Zagen;

so haben dich ja die Kinder lieb.

Mit diesem Hinfluten, mit diesem Münden

in breiten Armen ins offene Meer,

mit dieser wachsenden Widerkehr

will ich dich bekennen, will ich dich verkünden

wie keiner vorher…

I believe in everything that has never yet been said.

I will set my most faithful feelings free.

What no one has been willing to dare

will become automatic for me.

If that is presumptuous, my God, forgive.

But I merely want to say to you:

My best strength shall be like a desire,

that is without anger and without hesitation;

the way children love you.

With this flood, with this flowing

in the wide arms of the open sea,

with this expanding returning

I will acknowledge you, I will reveal you

as no one before.

IV. Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein

Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug

um jede Stunde zu weihn.

Ich bin auf der Welt zu gering und doch nicht klein genug

um vor dir zu sein wie ein Ding,

dunkel and klug.

Ich will meinen Willen und will meinen Willen begleiten

die Wege zur Tat;

und will in stillen, irgendwie zögernden Zeiten,

wenn etwas naht,

unter den Wissenden sein

oder allein.

Ich will dich immer spiegeln in ganzer Gestalt,

und will niemals blind sein oder zu alt

um dein schweres schwankendes Bild zu halten.

Ich will mich entfalten.

Nirgends will ich gebogen bleiben,

denn dort bin ich gelogen, wo ich gebogen bin.

Und ich will meinen Sinn

wahr vor dir. Ich will mich beschreiben wie ein Bild das ich sah,

lange und nah,

wie ein Wort, das ich begriff,

wie meinen täglichen Krug,

wie meiner Mutter Gesicht,

wie ein Schiff,

das mich trug

durch den tödlichsten Sturm.

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy.

I am to small in the world, and yet not tiny enough to stand before you as a thing, dark and clever.

I want my will, and I want to accompany my will on the way to the deed;

and I want in the still, sometimes hesitating moments,

when something draws near

to be among the wise

or alone.

I want to reflect you in your complete form,

and never be blind or too old

to carry your heavy, fluctuating image.

I want to unfurl.

Nowhere do I want to remain hidden,

for where I am hidden, I am false.

And I want my thoughts true before you.

I want to describe myself like an image that I saw,

long and closely,

like a word, that I understood,

like my daily mug,

like my mother’s face,

like a ship,

that carried me through a deadly storm.

V. Du siehst, Ich will viel

Du siehst, ich will viel.

Vielleicht will ich Alles:

das Dunkel jedes unendlichen Falles

und jedes Steigens lichtzitterndes Spiel.

Es leben so viele und wollen nichts,

und sind durch ihres leichten Gerichts

glatte Gefühle gefürstet.

Aber du freust dich jedes Gesichts,

das dient und dürstet.

Du freust dich Aller, die dich gebrauchen

wie ein Gerät.

Noch bist du nicht kalt, und es ist nicht zu spät,

in deine werdenden Tiefen zu tauchen,

wo sich das Leben ruhig verrät.

You see, I want a lot.

Perhaps, I want everything:

the darkness of each unending Fall

and the play of each sparkling ascent.

So many live and want nothing,

and are crowned with glad feelings

because of their easy judgments.

But you rejoice in each face,

that serves and thirsts.

You rejoice in all, who need you

like an instrument.

You are not yet cold, and it is not too late,

to submerge in your becoming depths,

where life is calmly revealed.

Questions about form

2011-10-26T21:17:00.002-05:00

My friend Katie Ganson invited me to be interviewed by one of her classes the other day. One of the more interesting questions asked by a non-musician was whether or not there are pre-made forms for musical compositions like there are for term papers. I gave a brief answer in the class, but here are a few more developed thoughts.

Form, when it is working properly, is always the result of an honest grappling with the ideas involved. Form, when it isn't working properly, functions as a mold into which you can pour notes and words. Form is free and and expansive when it works properly. It is restrictive when it doesn't. We should not ignore the conclusions reached by those that preceded us. Many of the forms taught in text books are representative of those conclusions. It is interesting to discover how very few Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven sonatas actually conform to the textbooks. The classic forms are not prescriptions but discoveries that inform our creative endeavors. A theory teacher of mine was once on the hunt for a Mozart Sonata that fit perfectly into Sonata-Allegro form and asked if I knew one of the top of my head. I pointed out that if you want to find one, it is much easier to start your search amongst the kleinmeisters. I think that is as true for scholarly papers as it is for musical work. So, you can add the 5 paragraph paper with a 3 pronged thesis statement to jeans skirts and Space Odyssey scenes air brushed on the side of vans to the things that I hate in this world.

Ford Crown Victory: Prequel

2011-10-20T22:37:00.000-05:00

When we started dating, I had a white ’76 Chevy Nova with mag wheels. The car fit my personality like an over-sized jacket, and I had to stretch out my machismo just to get my hands past the cuff links. When my dad first bought the car for me, my friends and I had some difficulty in determining its gender. The vehicle’s well-developed biceps fooled us momentarily. After checking under the skirt, she was christened, “La Nova Cabrona” by a Cuban-American friend. The passenger door could only be opened from the outside, which might have been used to some advantage. It turned out to be rather ironic because the number of girls who had actually dated me when I had the Nova was rather small.

The Nova’s defining moment came when we were in college together. During class one day, my friend Brian snuck out to the University parking lot and attached a late 70’s style license plate with the words “Cute n’ Sexy” on the front of the car. The words were airbrushed in that sickening manner that all artists of the compressed air genre seem to have ready at their disposal.

The three principle mediums of "airbrush artists" are the license plate, the T-shirt, and the van side. An entire bastardized ouvre has been created by artists expressing themselves all over the place by means of hose and compressor. Brian had discovered an example sine qua non. While the artist was clearly influenced by the so-called “unicorn” school, the piece managed to introduce a graffiti edginess while still maintaining a classic “space odyssey” sensibility. I saw the license plate immediately after class and knew where blame was to be placed.

I found Brian laughing, but was unprepared for his next assault. Brian was a cunning foe and had the advantage of knowing me since eighth grade. I had expected a simple frontal attack, but he, aware of my weaknesses, had prepared a pincer move. “Take that thing off my car! I don’t want to drive around and have people looking at me with a ‘Cute n’ Sexy’ air brushed license plate,” I said.
“Why? Because you don’t have the existential courage to drive around with that plate on the front of your car?” he quipped.

The blow fell true. Despite the ironic situation of having to prove my existential freedom by doing something that someone else told me to do, I could no longer remove the plate without acting in "bad faith." Brian was standing there complete with his French beret, goatee, and horned rimmed glasses mocking me. “He even dressed the part,” I thought. I pictured Matthieu in The Road to Freedom stabbing that knife into his hand. I could see Jean Paul Sartre himself saying, “Kurt, Matthieu could put a knife through his hand, and you can’t even put an air-brushed license plate on your car!”

Now, it happens to be the case that I am both “Cute” n’ “Sexy,” but I am not the type of person that likes to spend exorbitant amounts of time defending truths which are both obvious and self-evident. However, for the sake of acting in good faith and announcing to all those motorists driving around the streets of Tampa that had not yet perceived these truths, I maintained my car-front placard for six months. Each time I would exit the car at a convenient store, passers-by would immediately glance toward the emerging driver to see if the plate was warranted. “He’s alright,” I could see them say, “but he’s not all that.” After receiving a concession from Brian that I had fulfilled my existential duties to the point of supererogation, the plate was removed and placed in a prominent place in my bedroom to remind all that entered that my existential freedom had been tested in the fire and proved worthy.

    Jennifer brought a white Volkswagen Rabbit to our relationship. Its ears were worn out, and its fur had faded in spots; but it could still hop around a bit. Riding in the Rabbit whilst Jennifer drove was always a time of excitement in my life. It was the same sort of thrill I used to get as a child when I was trying to perfect a new trick on my bicycle. Driving the Rabbit was like trying to jump a makeshift ramp with your little sister riding on the handlebars. If your timing wasn’t exact, there could be consequences for both you and the passenger.   The Rabbit was an adventure-mobile that could turn the simplest ten-minute drive into a thrilling safari.

Despite its general good nature and kind demeanor, it had two quirks. We all have strange relatives and learn how to work around their idiosyncrasies. “Don’t start talking to Uncle Joe about Tibetan alternative health techniques.” “Hide the fingernail clippers before cousin Bob gets here because he has a phobia,” etc. The Rabbit’s first oddity was that it was an ardent socialist. It hated to turn right for any reason. Forward and backward were fine. It loved heading to the left. If you attempted to force a right turn upon the vehicle, the engine would become as quiet and motionless as a Quaker at an NRA meeting.

Jennifer would devise complex schemes for arriving at destination points. By using a series of left turns, the car would become confused enough to allow you to reach a destination that was actually to the right. This technique is well known to most socialist dictators, but it can work for navigating left-wing vehicles as well. If a situation arose where a right turn was inevitable, a carefully timed procedure was required. During the right turn, the driver would depress the clutch as the motor stalled. With the clutch down, she shifted into neutral and allowed the car as much forward momentum as possible. She completed the procedure by shifting back into first, popping the clutch, and depressing the accelerator. Restarting the car during right turns gave surrounding automobiles the impression that the Rabbit was as capable of bi-directionality as any Libertarian. Accomplishing the right-turn-ritual while still maintaining control of the car was so mentally taxing that the driver occasionally forgot to say, “Lift!”

As with all left-leaning activists, the Rabbit eventually had a romance with environmental issues. While frolicking in the salty bay air of Tampa, the Rabbit developed a rusty blemish where the windshield and hood greeted each other. The melanoma turned out to be malignant, and the cancer bore a hole through to the interior of the car leaving its organs exposed. The mighty rainstorms of a Tampa summer, when finding their paths unobstructed, felt obliged to deposit several inches of water through the small hole. The waters formed tributaries that gathered into a wetlands area on the floorboards of the back seat.

One could walk across the parking lot on a hot summer day and see the ecosystem in the car functioning like an oversized terrarium. Cumulus clouds would form in the back seat and drift to the front where they would rain down and become the tributaries that fed the wetlands. This aqueous habitat gave the driver even more obligations than the perfunctory steering and right turn restarting. Any braking motion required the driver to shout, “Lift!” for the passenger. When you pressed the brakes on the Rabbit, a small tsunami would form on the floorboards of the back seat and rush forward to spend its fury on the back of your shoes and socks. Regular passengers in the Rabbit became quickly acculturated. It only required one experience of the “shoe and sock drenching” to develop an immediate reaction to the word “Lift!” from the driver’s mouth. Eventually, it didn’t matter if the passenger was actually in the vehicle. I could be sitting in a chair at home, and Jennifer would say “Lift!” The word worked like the doctor’s rubber mallet on my kneecap, and my legs would suddenly rise up from the ground in reflexive response.

    Those cars left us. The Nova went off to help some at risk children confined in a Hillsborough County Sherrif’s Youth Ranch proving that she wasn’t such a “Cavron” after all. The Rabbit scampered off to die in the woods somewhere, and Grandma Bean was kind enough to give us her old Crown Victoria. We had no idea when we accepted the car that it would make us famous for a week in Dallas, Texas.

Further adventures of Kaptain Kartoffelkopf

2011-10-19T22:00:00.000-05:00

The reprise of my own idiocy has struck again in what is becoming an all to familiar litany of stories. I could be an idiot-savant if I could just get the savant part down. This time it occurred as follows:

I was playing for several members of a horn studio for a little competition at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The winner had to play at a 4pm recital. As I was going in to the recital, Jenn texted me to ask what time she should pick me up. I texted back that I would text her as we were going on stage. If she left then, she would be down to get me by the time I finished playing. All went according to plan, but Jenn didn’t make it when I finished. After waiting for about 5 minutes, I sent her another message that said, “Where are you?” She arrived shortly after, and we left. About six blocks away from the University, the following dialogue ensued:

Kurt: We have to go back. I forgot something.
Jenn: What?
Kurt: We have to go back. I forgot something.
Jenn: I heard you before. What did you forget.
(after a long pause)
Kurt: I don’t want to tell you.
Jenn: What?!
Kurt: I don’t want to tell you. We just have to go back.
Jenn: What did you forget? Your cell phone? Your computer?
Kurt: No. I don’t want to tell you.
Jenn: I’m going to see when you walk out of the building with it. You need to tell me what it is.
Kurt: I don’t want to tell you because you’re just going to tell me that I’m a dumb-ass, and then you’ll be on about it all night.
Jenn: Just tell me.
Kurt: No.
Jenn: If you don’t tell me right now, I can promise that the rest of the evening will not be enjoyable.
(after a long pause, sheepishly)
Kurt: The car.

Yes, it turns out I had driven myself to work like a big boy and then forgotten how I arrived. I then pestered my wife to pick me up and complained when she was a few moments late. In my defense, I was playing Mozart, Richard Strauss, and also some Franz Strauss. That’s the dad, and he had asthma.

For further adventures you can read here and here and here and here and here and here. There are many more that aren't posted yet.

Aesthetics: Form, Content, and my dad's cheesecake theory

2011-10-18T22:09:00.001-05:00

So the big question that has to be answered is: Is form separable from content in an art object as St. Augustine seems to suggest. I confess that I haven't been able to puzzle out all of the questions in this problem. There is somewhere that Carl Dalhaus (I think in the 19th century book) says that in regard to the Beethoven Symphonies that the form is the content. We have to travel a little carefully here. Musicians sometimes mean something a little different by "form" than what philosophers of art mean.

An interesting way to look at the problem is through the lens of reinterpretation. What are we to do with Stokowski's orchestral version of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in D minor or the Byrds singing Mr. Tambourine Man? Isn't Beethoven's orchestration part of the content of what he has to say? Can we really change it (the "form" in a philosophical sense) without fundamentally altering the content? If Guernica was a sculpture instead of a painting, wouldn't its meaning be subtly altered? For an even more difficult question: Would The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock mean something different if it were a painting? Is it possible that as some commentators on Buber have said that the only real response to a work of art is another work of art?

The funny thing is, it is fairly easy to separate form from content in conversation. We do it all the time for pedagogical purposes. The existential reality of our confrontation with real art objects is more complex. As my dad said to me earlier this week, "Don't you think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? Like a cheesecake?"

I'm thinking I like my dad's "cheesecake theory of art" better than St. Augustine's "coffee cup".

Aesthetics: Alternative to St. Augustine's coffee cup theory of art

2011-10-17T17:05:00.001-05:00

My good friend, Brian McMillan passed along a lovely passage today. It is from Lars Iyer's book The Birth of Philosophy in Poetry: Blanchot, Char, Heraclitus. It's a nice alternative to the art object as a vehicle for carrying content theory.

"As for Heidegger, the experience of nature in question is linked to a certain experience of the origin. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot tells us that the work of art “is always original and at all moments a beginning” – it appears, first of all, to be “ever new, the mirage of the future’s inaccessible truth”: it shimmers before us, seeming to promise a truth that never finally arrives (The Space of Literature 229). Second, its novelty, this “new ‘now,’” he writes, “renews this ‘now’ which it seems to initiate”; welling up now, happening now, it disrupts the reigning order of experience. And third, Blanchot tells us, “it is the very old, frightfully ancient, lost in the night of time”; it precedes us, it is a thing of the past, but it returns, renewing our time and promising us a future (The Space of Literature 229). The original experience happens, as I will explain, as the happening of the work of art and in so doing, it remembers what is “forgotten” in the coming to presence of the real. The poem, by remembering, also renews our time by drawing on the future – not as the future that one might calculate or plan in advance, nor as the outcome of what is caused in the present, but what, from the perspective of plans and programmes, can only appear as a mirage."

Rilke translations: Ich lebe mein Leben

2011-10-16T19:50:00.002-05:00

In anticipation of the upcoming premiere, I'm continuing some translating work for the programs. This is the first text in the new Rilke song cycle from his Stundenbuch. The poems are written from the perspective of a medieval monk.

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.

I live my life in widening rings
that expand over all things.
I may not complete the last one,
but I will attempt it.

I circle around God, around the ancient tower,
and I circle for thousands of years:
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm,
or a great song.

Aesthetics: St. Augustine's Church coffee

2011-10-13T00:08:00.003-05:00

In one of the more famous passages of the Confessions, St. Augustine’s brings his “coffee cup theory of art” (which you can read about here) to church with mixed results.

“Yet again, when I remember the tears I shed at the Psalmody of Thy Church, in the beginning of my recovered faith; and how at this time I am moved, not with the singing, but with the things sung, when they are sung with a clear voice and modulation most suitable, I acknowledge the great use of this institution. Thus I fluctuate between peril of pleasure and approved wholesomeness; inclined the rather (though not as pronouncing an irrevocable opinion) to approve of the usage of singing in the church; that so by the delight of the ears the weaker minds may rise to the feeling of devotion. Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music.”

First of all, we need to acknowledge the irony involved. St. Augustine gets worried that he is taking more delight in the music than in the words that it is conveying. The irony is that he is worrying in what is generally accepted to be some of the most beautifully penned Latin prose in the history of the world. He reluctantly accepts that fancy mugs might be necessary, but they can be distracting if they keep you from really focusing on the coffee. We know this argument from our relationships. “I really like your for your personality, not your looks.” To quote from one of my favorite poems, “But all the time he was talking she had in mind/The notion of what his whiskers would feel like on the back of her neck.” (I’m giving out some facebook love to anyone that can name the poem without using google.)

St. Augustine’s coffee cup theory will take some time to unpack, but it has a long history in the world of aesthetic philosophy. For church musicians, it finds its most extreme form in the thought of John Calvin and the Geneva Psalter. Music’s purpose is to serve the text without distracting us with interesting little sounds. That theology has had a severe impact on the artistic life of the churches in the Calvinist tradition. I do an experiment with my classes on occasion to underline the point. I write headers on the board listing the major Judeo-Christian denominations. I ask the class to name composers from history. As they name them, I write the composer’s names under the religious tradition to which they at least nominally assented. The last experiment looked something like this:

Judaism: Schoenberg, Bruch, Bernstein, Copland

Roman Catholic: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Messiaen

Orthodox: Pärt, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky

Lutheran: Bach, Mendelssohn, Buxtehude, Brahms

Anglican: Vaughn Williams, Britten, Tallis, Byrd

Calvinist: ???

Apparently, the book of “Great Calvinist Composers” is as brief as the book lampooned on Fawlty Towers: “Great English Lovers”

Aesthetics: St. Augustine's coffee cup

2011-10-11T16:25:00.003-05:00

St. Augustine’s views of art will take some time to tackle. He was certainly one of the most powerful and influential minds for the shaping of Western thought. In general, he tends to borrow much of his language and starting points from the neo-Platonists and Plotinus in particular. The big change is that his thought is theological and not strictly philosophical. For Plato, thought centered around what was the best art for the State. With Augustine, we move to thinking about how art stands in relation to God. It should also be noted that Augustine’s final arbiter on these questions are the Scriptures as he understands them.

One of the perennial issues in aesthetic philosophy is articulated clearly by Augustine in De Ordine Chapter 11. He says that “delight of the sense is one thing; delight through the sense is something else.” In one of his examples of this distinction, he quotes Vergil. “Why do the suns in the winter rapidly sink in the ocean? What is the hindrance that holds back late-coming nights in the summer?” Then he states, “our praise of the meter is one thing, but our praise of the meaning is something else.” So our delight in the meter is “delight of the sense,” and our praise of the meaning is “delight through the sense.” As my friend Lane Harder likes to say, there is a difference between idea and execution.

I think it is safe to say that we have all had an experience like this when encountering art objects. That is, there have been occasions when I really liked the ideas communicated by a novel or a movie, but I felt that the supporting architectural structure couldn’t bear up under the profundity of the concepts that where trying to be conveyed. Alternatively, I have encountered music, for example, that I found to be sonically stunning but emotionally unconvincing. This is a pregnant idea that will take some time to unpack.

Augustine gives us what I like to call a coffee cup theory of art. That is, we are to conceive of art objects as a coffee mug. There is an idea – the coffee – that is being carried inside of the object. The idea and the object are separable. Thus, we have a whole school of thought that emerges justifying ugliness by saying, “The main thing is the idea. If the coffee is good, it doesn’t matter if it is served in a Styrofoam cup.” I encounter this idea most often in religious institutions that justify presenting the worst that our culture has to offer artistically by saying that the coffee is good. On the other hand, we also see examples of people pointing out how innovative their mugs are hoping to slip us some Folgers instant coffee that we won’t notice in our distraction.

The underlying assumption in all of this is that art is supposed to do something. Whether or not that is the case will take some more blog posts.

UNL Chamber Singers sing Michelangelo's On Beauty

2011-10-09T21:50:00.002-05:00

I had the lovely surprise this weekend of discovering that the UNL Chamber Singers under the direction of Dr. Therees Hibbard were performing an older work of mine on a concert. As always, they sang with beautiful expressive intent. Thanks for creating such a beautiful moment for me today. I have never heard the work in a concert before despite the fact that it's been performed quite often.

This piece was written when I was emerging from a period of about 10 years when I wrote almost exclusively atonal music. I was beginning to explore some new things and set out to write a completely diatonic piece that I could still find interesting. My friend Robert Platte had introduced me to an ambient musician named Jeff Johnson in high school. He had a song with a text by Michelangelo, and I thought it would be perfect. I set about trying to find out if the translation was in the public domain. I was unsuccessful, so I got in touch with Jeff Johnson. I said, "Hey, where did you get that text? Is it in the public domain?" He said something like, "Funny you should ask. We never found the source of the translation when we did the album. I'm sure it's public domain. I actually took it from a poster that used to hang in my room." Said text is below the video.

Mine eyes which are enamored of things fair
And this my soul which for salvation cries
May never heavenward rise
Unless the sight of beauty lifts them there.
Down from the loftiest star
A splendor falls to the earth
And draws desire from afar
To that which gave it birth
So love, and heavenly fire, and counsel wise.
The noble heart finds most in star-like eyes.

Aesthetics: More rambling about Plotinus

2011-10-08T08:23:00.003-05:00

Whilst traversing the modest byways between two Universities on Lincoln’s adequate public transportation system, I have been re-reading some of Plotinus’ Ennead. I am certainly struck by the profound and detailed supernal vision he describes. It is easy to see why St. Augustine fell under his spell and borrowed so much of his language. I also find that his mystical approach to epistemology is incredibly relevant today. He complains that knowledge is misunderstood as “a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our sciences of the sense-realm.”

The idea that we “know” a thing by being able to explain its component parts is an argument that is still seductive. When we start by trying to explain the absolute uniqueness of a phenomenon by building it up from its pieces, it always seems like something is missing when we get back to the concrete reality of the form. I do like talking about the building blocks, but there is something that doesn’t ever quite contain the whole ontic nature of the thing in itself. The physicist Richard Feynman describes the limited nature of this sort of knowledge by saying suggesting that all scientific statements are a “kind of approximation to the complete truth.”

So, Plotinus says we need a wisdom that is not “built up of the theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail coordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.” This makes a lot of sense from an artistic perspective. I remember reading a Ravel quote one time where someone asked him about a piece he was working on. He said something like, “It’s all written except for the notes.” I find that idea very concomitant with my own creative process. I struggle with the whole. When that struggle is finished, I work out the details. I know of many other artists who report the same experience.

The big question for Plotinus is what does my “struggling with the whole” look like? Though there are some that claim that works have sprung, fully formed, from the head of Zeus, I just don’t think so. I think they are forged in the concrete reality of working with real materials. There is always something in Plotinus that can’t acknowledge real beauty here and now on this earth. For him, beauty is only a pale reflection of the true beauty in heaven. Maybe. This goes back to the old paradigm that William Barrett liked to call “Hellenistic vs. Hebraic” man. I heard an interview with Dr. Cornell West where he said something like this, “Blood and shit. Born of a woman. When you find someone that can love you in your blood and shit, that’s the real deal.”

Plotinus’ beautific vision is always a little too other worldly for me. It never really allows the wonder of a person or a work of art to exist in the concrete reality of this world. They or it are always only beautiful insofar as they reflect something beyond. There is always a qualifier. There is always an “insofar as”. I’m not sure that’s enough. I want to love people and make art in the incarnational reality of this world – in the “blood and shit”. I suppose this means that I don’t mind a mystical approach to knowledge, but Plotinus never allows enough of a mystical approach to concrete phenomena to allow them real participation in divinity.

Aesthetics: Plotinus and immoral art

2011-09-24T22:43:00.003-05:00

Plotinus (c. 200-270 BCE) was a neo-Platonist that developed the first real metaphysic of beauty. As you might expect, his ideas about beauty are wrapped up in Platonic ideals. The true beauty is found in the Ideal, and the concrete object gives us a reflection of the true source of the beauty. Of course, this theory has run into some problems along the way, but it is a profound influence in the history of aesthetic philosophy.

One of the more interesting passages from his Ennead has been wrestling with me for a few days. He says “that the beauty is not in the concrete object is manifest from the beauty there is in matters of study, in conduct and custom; briefly, in soul or mind.” He continues suggesting that we can perceive the beauty of “wisdom” in a man who is outwardly unattractive. Presumably, this is a Socrates reference. What interests me here the way he equates personal virtue with aesthetic beauty. At one time, this was a common idea, but it sounds strange to our jaded modern ears. To wit: If something is beautiful it is morally good.

The thought has even persisted into the 20th century. I am particularly fond of a Russian philosopher named Berdyaev. Here is his reiteration of the concept. “Beauty is the Christianized cosmos in which chaos is overcome; that is why the Church may be defined as the true beauty of existence. Every achievement of beauty in the world is in the deepest sense a process of Christianization. Beauty is the goal of all life; it is the deification of the world. Beauty, as Dostoievsky has said, will save the world. An integral conception of the Church is one in which it is envisaged as the Christianized cosmos, as beauty. Only a differential conception can transform it into an institution.”

“Beauty will save the Universe.” Bold words from Dostoyevsky. This certainly takes us down some dangerous theological paths. I am pretty sure, however, that ugliness won’t save the Universe. I am very sure that creating beauty in the world is a morally good thing to do. The tricky part is the implication. When someone makes an ugly art work (and I don’t mean that in a narrow sense), am I willing to take a stand and say that it is immoral? That’s a difficult thing. Certainly, I can see some items of propaganda fitting into this category, but actual art objects are harder. I have a profound philosophical disagreement with works like Cage’s 4’33’’, but I value the work. I probably do think it is immoral in the sense that its aim is the destruction of personality. There is so much to learn from it – sometimes precisely by disagreeing – that I find it too valuable not to teach.

Aesthetics: Aristotle, Ke$ha, flutes, and conductors

2011-09-19T18:32:00.003-05:00

In Politics, there is a passage where Aristotle spends some time on what sort of music we should include in the education of children. He takes some wonderful pot-shots at the flute and flutists in general. Some of my favorite gems include: “…the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character; it is too exciting” and “the acquirement of flute-playing contributes nothing to the mind.”

Aristotle takes a slightly different approach to music than Plato. Aristotle is OK with music for “intellectual enjoyment, for relaxation and for recreation.” Let’s not go too far though. You shouldn’t understand this to mean that one should become a “vulgar” professional musician. That would be disgusting and unbecoming for a gentleman and a philosopher. You need to play well enough to become a critic. Judging from today’s standards of criticism in the newspapers, I’d say the bar has been set at around six weeks of piano lessons in 4th grade.

What is actually interesting in the passage is the part where he is criticizing professional music contests. In contests, “the performer practices the art, not for the sake of his own improvement, but in order to give pleasure, and that of a vulgar sort, to his hearers.” You can see where this is going. When the performer gets in front of the rabble that are already vulgar, he/she wants to please them and “the result is that the performers are vulgarized, for the end at which they aim is bad. The vulgarity of the spectator tends to lower the character of the music and therefore of the performers; they look to him – he makes them what they are, and fashions even their bodies by the movements which he expects them to exhibit.”

So there you have it. More than 2000 years ago, Grandpa Aristotle was walking around saying, “These kids and their damn popular music. At least in my day, music had a nice Dorian melody that you could hum. Now it’s just all vulgar. Is the flute even a real instrument? Give it 2000 years or so, and they’ll have Ke$ha. They'll deserve it.”

Funny stuff, but I don’t find that the world of serious music is that immune to the problem. My friend Lane Harder podcasts about these problems here. I’ve experienced the vulgarization process because of "aiming at a bad end" most often with conductors. There are some conductors that communicate that the reason we are working so hard is in service to the music. There are some conductors that communicate that the reason we are working so hard is in service to their career. I’m not always sure how they do it, but I can spot it right away. When I’m playing for the selfish ones, I’m never as vulnerable because I won’t entrust my emotional life to someone that won’t care for it and protect it. I just shut down, do my job, and play the notes.

That crowd thing is a problem. It's why we see so many composers find a "style" and continue to crank out the same thing for their entire career. Nothing against Steve Reich. I like a few of his tunes, but can anyone say that "9-11 WTC" is the work of someone exploring and pushing boundaries. That's OK. Maybe he didn't want to for this piece. I'm just saying that the Beethoven 9 is different than the Beethoven 1. That's what I want to be.

Aesthetics: Teaching honesty in music composition?

2011-09-13T22:04:00.001-05:00

In the Poetics, Aristotle gives us one of the first (if not the first) introduction to the idea that there is an economy in works of art. He says, “For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.” I don’t believe that I am uncommon in the way that I am progressing toward maturity. That is, I am much more adept at spotting the extraneous and extracting it than I was when I was young. I can more readily assess an idea and its potential development. I can balance the unity and diversity necessary to establish an economy of means that allows me to create a musical work that is poignant without running to far from the central point. This is a skill that I haven’t worked so hard to develop in my prose. I enjoy the diversions of wandering thoughts.

The issue that still tries to pin me on the mat is the pedagogy problem. To wit: how do you handle a student that brings you a work that is immature and lacks any sort of economy. To be sure, there is a different economy in a poem than in a novel. There is a different economy in a fugue than there is in a symphony. The difficult part is in the way we foster students to maturity of economy.

I certainly remember the anxiety I experienced as a teenager the first time my works were exposed to mature composers. I remember how I hung on their every word for encouragement. Most of my teachers were very kind and did not press to hard on the issue of the ideas – however immature they may have been – but focused on how well those ideas were communicated.

All this is to say, I have an idea that my job is to foster honesty in creative work. I don’t know how to assess “honesty” aesthetically, so I retreat to technique. Is this really what you mean to say? Do you realize that the climax you are trying to establish has been betrayed by foreshadowing that all but revealed the conclusion? Did you really want to take away the significance of the end by presenting it so clearly in the beginning?

In some ways, I find those questions easier to ask than others. Do you realize that the substance of your ideas are well trodden paths that have already been explored? Do you really hunger to know the Western canon well enough to understand the tradition in which you are participating? Are you willing to discover that what you thought was a profound emotional experience was really something trite? That’s the hard stuff, and I don’t have good answers for these problems.

There is one thing that I have experienced that gives me comfort. I have had a few students that I knew very well. I could tell when they were making the easy choice instead of the honest choice. I could tell when they were placing expediency over truth. I could tell when they were trying to impress my sensibilities instead of their own artistic calling. I confronted them on it every time.

Sneak peek at my 9-11 memorial music

2011-09-10T12:58:00.004-05:00

This is a preview of the first movement of a piece that David Matthews commissioned for the University of South Florida Chamber Singers. The official premiere of the whole piece is going to be at Florida ACDA in November. Dan Monek is also performing it at Marietta College. I was trying to write neo-Franco-Flemish music in this movement. The kind of thing Josquin might write if he was alive today.

We are using the first movement as part of our 9-11 10th anniversary service tomorrow night at 8pm at St. Mark's on the Campus. The lovely singers in the video are the vocal ensemble Dulces Voces.

The text is taken from the 9th century Fleury play Ordo Rachelis which I believe was written by Notker the Stutterer. Here is a translation of the Latin.

Alas! We see the lacerated limbs of tender youths! Alas! sweet children murdered soley by madness! Alas! whom neither your devotion or age restrained! Alas! miserable mothers who are compelled to see this! Why do we not submit under these deeds? Alas! because of our memories, our sorrows cannot be lifted. Joy has no power for the sweet, promising youths are no more

The beginning, middle, and end

2011-09-06T17:26:00.002-05:00

Just in case you were confused, Aristotle explains it all.

"A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it."

Aristotle and didacticism in art

2011-09-05T13:59:00.001-05:00

As usual, Aristotle follows Plato and suggests that the arts are about imitation. He suggests that humans are imitative by nature and delight in imitation. We even like to see the nasty bits imitated. In Poetics, he says that “though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies.” I’m reminded of Basil Fawlty saying to Sybil, “That type would wear a dog turd around his neck if it was made of gold.”

Here is the spot where Aristotle goes a little further than his teacher and says that there is a another factor involved. That is, “to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning – gathering the meaning of things.” Even dumb people like to learn.

The problem that Aristotle sets up is one that we haven’t quite resolved yet. Does art have content that is being communicated? Should it? If it does, what is the content made from? The artists emotions? In fact, Aristotle says that if we don’t grasp the content because we are unfamiliar with the object that is being imitated, our pleasure “will not be in the picture as an imitation of it, but will be due to the execution of colouring or some similar cause.” So, failing to grasp content, we are thrust back to execution. At this point in history, I don’t think Aristotle would argue that the execution is the content.

We tend to get a little skittish around obvious didacticism in art works, sort of. When artists are purposefully heavy handed in making a point that is “non-art” related, things get weird. So, some people like To Kill a Mockingbird because it teaches tolerance, and that’s OK, but if the art work teaches something different, let’s say something like a minstrel show that exploits racial stereotypes, then it’s “propaganda”. There is a dangerous line here. We’ve seen it in recent years with things like Michael Moore’s films. Some say they are documentaries. Some say they are propaganda films. That is, if I like the content, it’s art. If I don’t like the content, it’s propaganda.

The danger, as I see it, is that the easy solution is to separate the technical matter from the content. Then we can say, “I can appreciate it from a technical artistic point of view, but I disagree with the content.” I’m still not convinced of this approach. I suppose that is mostly because in my own work, I find that form and content have such a symbiotic relationship that I find it hard to separate the two and still conceive of the work in the same way. This makes me very confused on the didacticism question too. I hate a sit-com that tries to teach me a moral lesson, but I love a folk story that does the same thing. I hate the Czerny Etudes, but I love the Chopin Etudes. I can’t tolerate a televangelist telling me not to be envious, but I love Othello. I have a suspicion that what I don’t like about the things I hate is not just the execution, but the execution as it is conceived in relation to the content. I guess that’s because I have a difficult time grasping what execution without content might really mean.

again on the evolutionary theory

2011-09-02T00:17:00.001-05:00

I think I’ve finally figured out what I don’t like about the American press and evolutionary theory. When they interview biologists, I’m usually okay. When they interview psychologists, I get a little weird.

Consider this report on NPR today:

"Embed a tiny little person or a tiny little animal anywhere in the scene and they'll notice it changing right away," he says. On the other hand, people were really bad at noticing changes in things like buildings.

"We actually had other images where entire grain silos were appearing and disappearing and they would report that there was no change in the scene," he says.

More recent research suggests that people actually pay as much attention to animals as they do to other people, New says.

And he says once a person has detected a living creature, their brain keeps monitoring it — probably because, unlike, say, a bridge or a building, a person or animal can suddenly turn from friendly to hostile."

I assume that the implication here is that once bridges and buildings turn hostile – and a billion years pass – we will have evolved to the state that we will keep track of the grain silos disappearing and report the change in the scene.

This always seems like an ex nihilo argument to me. The tacit assumption is that because a thing is, it is a successful evolutionary strategy. Leaving behind Gould’s Panda Bear Thumbs, we don’t really know do we. If we try to pin the thing down to a certain point in time, it gets confusing. Will the rattlesnakes and spiders get us in the long run, or will it be the buildings and the bridges and the carbon fuels? We don’t really know what is successful. We only know what works right now when we have to buy bean burritos and make it to our jobs and classes on time.

As for me, I’m jumping over buildings and bridges just to be on the safe side.

Aristotle and the masterpiece (part 2)

2011-08-31T23:40:00.003-05:00

Aristotle argues that in a “good work of art…it is not possible either to take away or to add anything” without in some way damaging it. Whenever I think about this, I always think of young Berlioz when he was working in the Biblioteque Nationale. He would check out scores and sit in the student seats down in the pit at the opera. If a conductor changed something (like having flutes play a piccolo part), he would start screaming about not following the composer’s intention. Of course, that was back in the day when conductors felt fairly comfortable mixing and matching entire movements of symphonies.

The idea of a masterpiece is actually hard to access when you think about it. Well, Beethoven’s 5th symphony might be a masterpiece, but it wasn’t that night when the old lady kept coughing and unwrapping candy next to me, plus I think the horn player got in a fight with his girlfriend so his playing was uninspired. I think that the Grünwald Crucifixion is a masterpiece, but it wasn’t so good when I was chasing my four year old around keeping him off of the paintings in the national museum of art, plus the lighting was a little weird in that spot. Also, when I was reading the Brothers Karamozov, I wasn’t paying attention during one page. I started thinking about what I would make for dinner.

If the actual encounter with the “masterpiece” always has something working against it, then where do we go? One option is to go with what I’ll call the Urtext theory. I first heard it as a child at church. It would go like this:

LuCy MayS: The Bible is the inerrant word of God.
Turk: You don’t mean a particular translation do you?
LuCy MayS: No, I mean the original.
Turk: Do we have copies of the original?
LuCy MayS: No, but we have accurate copies of copies.
Turk: How accurate?

You get the idea. A tremendous amount of modern scholarship is based around the idea of stripping off the obfuscating layers and revealing the original work. I value this scholarship very much, and I almost always find insight from looking at the research. The problem is, producing a final, authoritative version always sends scholars chasing after Foucault’s Pendulum. We can only get to the point where we say, “This is what we know so far. Something new may come up.”

Some have chosen the mystical union with the artist approach. That is, I have some special gnosis about the creator of this work because of 1) my close spiritual connection, 2) my rigorous research, 3) I’m related 4) I knew him/her personally. This argument always runs straight into the intentional fallacy, so I find that it’s not very helpful.

For musicians, I don’t really think that when we say that Beethoven’s 5th is a “masterpiece” - and that nothing could be “added or taken away” without distorting the work – that we mean it in a completely literal sense. That is, if Beethoven hadn’t doubled the famous opening in the clarinets, and we received the work with that one difference, we would likely not think it any less of a masterpiece. We might even praise Beethoven for not doubling the opening.

I think we really mean that the work, apart from any specific encounter and yet including every specific encounter, provides one of the richest sources of aesthetic contemplation that we have. The macrocosmic architecture is supported by microcosmic interest. Analogs to the whole are discovered in smaller chunks. The work “bodies itself against us” [er leibt mir gegenüber] (to use one of Buber’s terms). When we try to dissect it, we can say that it affects us emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, etc. However, no analogy seems to fit. It is a unique experience. It is a well that doesn’t seem to run dry. It is, as e.e.cummings once wrote, “as large as the world, and as small as alone.”

Whatever a masterpiece may finally be, I know that when I encounter one, I keep returning to it. It is a profoundly human object. I mean that in the sense that I don’t have to keep going back to Duchamps urinal. I got the point the first time.

The "bugger for the bottle" meets a toilet in a museum

2011-08-30T20:11:00.002-05:00

In book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle continues Plato’s line of thought aand suggests that the ideals of art are centered around proportion. “Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this – the intermediate not in the object but relative to us.” This “relative to us” seems to be a little motion away from Plato. At least in my reading, Plato always seems to suggest that proportion is fairly universal when he uses phrases like “the art of measurement is universal.” Aristotle at least allows for the possibility of moving the standard from being centered in the object (or the ideal form of that object) to being in the human being.

He follows this passage by intimating a concept that is still with us today. “…we often say of good works of art that it is not possible either to take away or to add anything, implying that excess and defect destroy the goodness of works of art, while the mean preserves it; and good artists, as we say, look to this in their work.”

I have written elsewhere on this blog about proportion. The bigger issue here is that bit about it not being possible to “take away or add anything”. Aristotle has laid the groundwork for a bigger idea in this passage. The idea reaches its full height in the 19th century: there is such a thing as a masterpiece and you can’t mess with it.

I think I would like to tackle the masterpiece concept by first addressing some of the arguments against it. We have seen numerous attacks on the idea in the 20th century. To list a few examples that come to mind: Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik, some of the elements of the Bauhaus school that were aligned with the Neuesachlichkeit coming out of Paris (Cocteau et al.), the Völkisch movement, Dadaism, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp and found objects, and Andy Warhol’s pop art movement.

So, Satie comes on the scene and writes Vexations (c. 1890s) with the inscription, "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” The piece lasts around 24 hours. John Cage publishes Vexations 50 years later and writes its ugly step child, Organ/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible). Cage’s piece is being performed in Halberstadt, Germany and is currently scheduled to last 639 years. It apparently began with a rest that lasted for about 2 years. You can read about it (and listen if you dare) here.

I think it is interesting that when the masterpiece idea is confronted in a creative work, more often than not, it is proportion that gets the direct attack. I have had very good experiences with Cage’s work in my life, but I always run into the same problems and questions when I encounter it. So, to begin a discussion of the idea of a masterpiece, here are my questions about artists who deliberately set out to create an anti-masterpiece.

1. Why is it that when Warhol sets out to depersonalize and objectify “art” in the Cambell’s Soup Cans, he winds up creating a highly individualized, iconic 20th century art work that is associated with his personality?
2. As Norman Brown (Cage’s friend and regular critic) used to ask, if “everywhere you go is music, and everywhere you are is the best seat”, why do you need to organize a “Circus” event at all? Also, why do you get a private room to read your poems away from the chaos of everyone else?
3. Why do I enjoy performing Cage’s music more than I enjoy listening to it in the concert hall?
4. When I encounter anti-art, why do I always feel like I’ve had a philosophical experience instead of an aesthetic one? Also, why do I feel like Duchamp is lecturing me through a toilet? I mean, he put it in the museum. He didn’t bring the museum crowd to his house to look at the toilet there.
5. Why is it that when I encounter chance music or found object art, what I value most is when it conforms to a structure that I find analogous to works that are considered masterpieces? That is, isn’t it possible to have a poor performance of 4’33’’? (I performed it once with piano, trumpet, and electric bass the week that Cage died. It was OK, but too many were in on the joke, so it wasn’t that big a deal. It was a big time for the non-majors that showed up for that recital.) Immediately afterward, we said, “Wow, the second movement was really good, it really built to a climax!”

"Artist, you so crazy. Love always, your Plato"

2011-08-27T15:29:00.003-05:00

In the Ion, Plato lays out the central problem with artists in general. To wit: they’re crazy. Well, maybe they aren’t crazy all the time, but they are at least crazy when they are making their art. Socrates points out that “all good poets…compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed.” Just in case you missed it the first time, he repeats, “lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed.”

In fact, if the poet is not possessed and inspired, she (or in this case probably he) will not produce any poetry. “For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.”

Why? That’s the easy part. “God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers…in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves…but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.”

Hmmm. That’s a disturbing thought. I mean, it’s all sort of well and good if it’s Chuck D, but if God is “conversing” with me through Dr. Dre, I may have a problem. Then again, this may be a fairly theoretical discussion since Plato wasn’t all that interested in having poets and artists hang around his Republic. There are some lasting issues that, as usual, are very neatly laid out by Plato in the passages above.

#1 Creative genius implies a touch of madness. This is a powerful myth in our culture that remains very active in the popular imagination. It is not hard to justify. Consider this famous quote from composer Karlheinz Stockhausen about the star Sirius: “Other snippets of vitally important information then came to me through a couple of revelatory dreams. Crazy dreams, from which it emerged that not only did I come from Sirius itself, but that, in fact, I completed my musical education there.” The problem is, for every Stockhausen, there are plenty of Stravinskys who talk about the creative process in cold and calculating terms. The rule of thumb here appears to be that every time someone says, “This is how artists work”, a great artist emerges that doesn’t work like that at all.

#2 Inspiration is required to do creative work. This one is a little trickier. There is a wonderful passage in Style and Idea where Schoenberg says that he is unable to do a simple counterpoint exercise without “inspiration”. I think that one of the problems in untangling this issue is that Plato is describing a very particular type of oracular utterance. The analogy works very well when we think of action painters like Pollock and de Kooning. It gets stretched a little thin if I think of Thomas Mann toiling away on the four novels that comprise Joseph and his brothers. I think it is still accurate even in the context of concepts like Gebrauchsmusik. We just have to be careful that we don’t understand “inspiration” as the same thing as “ecstasy”. In my experience, most of the people that I know doing creative work have an initial idea that serves as an inspiration for their work. After that initial moment of inspiration, the process of working out that idea is like any other kind of work. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes dull, sometimes emotional, sometimes rational and calculated.

#3 Technique is necessary/unnecessary for artistic creation. This one is also fairly tricky for me to untangle. I’m a big fan of working on technical aspects of my medium. There is a certain sense in which all artists have to have a grasp of the basics. The poets that Plato is discussing were presumably using words and not just speaking in tongues, so they at least had grammar as a “technique”. The difficult part of this issue is that you don’t get to equate mastery of technique with artistic genius. Beethoven studied counterpoint with Albrechtsburger because Albrechtsburger was a master of technique. I’m not convinced that Beethoven ever mastered counterpoint. However, Beethoven created greater artworks (some think precisely because of his technical limitations!) It would be nice if artistic genius was just given to kind, hardworking people. It’s not. It’s often bestowed on the childish and immature. Think of Berlioz. Sometimes astounding gifts are heaped on people like Richard Wagner who had to be one of the most petulant human beings that ever walked the planet. How is it that he was such an ugly human being and produced such beautiful music?

Plato’s explanation starts to sound pretty good after a while.

Rick Perry is crazy, however...

2011-08-25T18:52:00.003-05:00

Many people have recently been offended by Rick Perry's recent comments on evolutionary theory. Personally, I find it to be one of the most tedious and boring issues on the face of the earth. I am supremely uninterested in evolutionary theory. However, I would like to remind everyone how long this debate has been bouncing around the planet. Consider this passage from Plato's Sophist Dialogues where Theaetetus is having a conversation with a Stranger (from c. 360 BCE).

Stranger: Looking, now, at the world and all the animals and plants, at things which grow upon the earth from seeds and roots, as well as at inanimate substances which are formed within the earth, fusile or non-fusile, shall we say that they come into existence - not having existed previously - by the creation of God, or shall we agree with vulgar opinion about them?

Theaetetus: What is it?

Stranger: The opinion that nature brings them into being from some spontaneous and unintelligent cause. Or shall we say that they are created by a divine reason and a knowledge which comes from God?

Theaetetus: I dare say that, owing to my youth, I may often waver in my view, but now when I look at you and see that you incline to refer them to God, I defer to your authority.

Personally, I just wish that people would stop talking about things with authority when they have no business doing it. I really don't value Rick Perry's authority on evolutionary theory. I'm not convinced that he has any training in the area. Evolutionary theory does very well answering "how" questions, but it gets a little confusing when it jumps over into "why" questions. So, in the same vein, when biologists start doing philosophy, I tend not to value their opinion very much.

Here are Kurt Vonnegut's thoughts from an NPR interview with Steve Inskeep from a few years ago.

Mr. VONNEGUT: Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.

INSKEEP: How are the scientists behaving tribally?

Mr. VONNEGUT: They say, you know, about evolution, it surely happened because their fossil record shows that. But look, my body and your body are miracles of design. Scientists are pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn't possibly have produced such machines.

INSKEEP: Does that mean you would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom?

Mr. VONNEGUT: Look, if it's what we're thinking about all the time; if I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it'd be on my mind all the time as to how the hell we really got this way. It's a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can't think this? Well, alright, as soon as you leave you can start thinking about it again without giving aid and comfort to the lunatic fringe of the Christian religion. Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.