Darby setting

Been texting a couple friends about this long-awaited project. Last year I tried to get a text setting of Eric Darby’s “Scratch and Dent Dreams” airborne, but it kinda exploded in the hangar. CAG’s application deadline gave me a kick in the pants to deliver a fresh version.

Setting a slam poem means making a stage piece, so the instrumentation (vox,fl,pc,af) was a bit of a breakthrough — should provide a bit more visual interest as I get through the text. It also enables distinct changes in character and presentation. Switching instruments means I can go back and forth between heightening the text to depicting it.

Berry & Rilke

Hi L,

This morning I was reading "Jayber Crow" and certain letters of R.M. Rilke. It occurs to me how Rilke’s attitude, reflected by my friends/teachers and the Dutch environment in general, so completely overtook me in my grad school years. In the following quote, Rilke’s writing to his wife Clara about his visit with Auguste Rodin, mentioning also his brief stay with the Tolstoys.

"He was silent a while and then said, wonderfully seriously he said it: … ‘il faut travailler, rien que travailler. Et il faut avoir patience.’ You should not think of wanting to do anything, you should only try to build up your own means of expression so as to say everything. You should work and have patience. Look neither to the right nor left. Draw your whole life into this circle, having nothing outside this life. As Rodin has done. J’y ai donné ma jeunesse, he said. It is certainly true. You must sacrifice all else. Tolstoi’s unpleasing household, the uncomfortableness in Rodin’s rooms: it all points to the same thing: you must choose — either this or that. Either happiness or art.”

What a contrast from Wendell Berry! Jayber experiences his life both past and present with more presence than judgment, and yet I perceive a deep sense of purpose that exceeds Rilke’s more immature ambitions. This week in small group we were talking about idolatry, and I got to explain to ___ how it’s hard to tell the difference between artmaking and worship: look how they talk about an artist’s vocation using worshipful, sacrificial language. (Look neither to the right nor left!)

I’m glad I’m not stuck in this attitude anymore; it wasn’t perfectly healthy for me. But as a Christian I haven’t found a worldview as complete as this one seemed to me, when I was younger.

Best,

Rama

Fiction on "Folk Bloodbath"

“And I’m looking over rooftops

and I’m hoping it ain’t true

that the same God who’s looking out for them

is looking out for me and you.

The angels laid them away, yes,

the angels laid them away.”

- Josh Ritter, “Folk Bloodbath”

Delia looks up from her lap with knit brows. Next to her, Lewis Collins glances up at the clock tower through the high window. Stacker Lee stirs fitfully for thoughts of a rope, while his keeper sleeps soundly for the fleshy rump and pillowy shoulders that ease his highbacked chair. 

Stacker’s grown used to the pair who sit, mild-mannered, at the foot of his bed, though that first night he had shot from his bed with his grimy teeth chattering, that night before Hangin’ Judge Billy Lyons had named his fate on the gallows, that night when he bolted across the length of his cell to rattle the bars and shout, “Jailer,” he said, “Lewis Collins’ ghost brought Delia’s with it too.”

She’s gazing at Stacker now with an expression only Lewis Collins thinks he can read, and glancing at her, his expression sours. She turns to him, a challenge in her thrown-back shoulders, and unseen by either of them, the jailer’s eyes follow them as a stark bead of sweat crosses the nape of his neck. He’s no fool, he misses nothing of these nights where the stars are needles limning the night, nor does it escape him how their silvery threads bind these two shades together, who now mistrust one another as they never could in life.

Seminar idea

Topics / Goals

  1. Problematize “access” and various types of gatekeeping

  2. Build narratives about access professionals like librarians, teachers, nonprofits, and researchers

  3. Speculate on the performance implications of target search, and encourage mindful browsing

Research literacy

  1. Overcoming language barriers on internationally sourced material

    • Eliminating the “foreign”

    • “Forensics” on YouTube — dirty v. clean sources

  2. Browsing ethics

    • Standard: RISM, IMSLP, library (opus numbering, call numbers, etc.)

    • Nonstandard: YT channels, record boxes, private collections

Activity

  1. Identify original source and research goal: what am I trying to find out? (How does this character work? Who is responsible for this story? How do fans communicate about this property?)

  2. Research simulation

  3. Explore formats for usable result

  4. Compile result

Song in dev?

Short story kernel adapted from a journal entry and a menu for tomorrow’s guests.

Sad suburban dad watches as his son grimaces in frustration, shutting the front door and preparing his explanation. Lavender drips off the boy’s tongue.

“If we were easier, I wouldn’t stay up late for you — I wouldn’t worry you hadn’t just changed your T-shirt and went out for the night, wouldn’t worry that this time you’d left for good. If we were easier, I’d trust myself and know you’d stay.”

He swills a glass with absinthe, and his son replies, “But then I do come back, and you fool yourself into thinking I never changed at all. All I had was two beers and the time of my life, and I want to tell you, ‘Don’t believe it, Dad, I’m changing with you, every day, every hour.’”

EK told me to turn the two beers into a song title — it might work out if this narrative stays punchy and succinct.

On My Mind 4

Names, names, names. Col des Moulinets, Graz-Burya, Rostov, Lubyanka, Prague, Lidice. ベンシヤーン and his Lidice poster, at the 1970 exhibition at the Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of Arts. It’s good to have stories connect in this way, since I don’t presently self-select to hear about those atrocities as creative nonfiction. Así se deje cantar las historias, además en la poesía con sus colores concretos. Too, in the TTRPG space where names and locations, historical or mythological, gain provenance in lived experience: case in point, Regency intrigue in the feywild in 2023. In the nexus between roleplay comedy and fictional espionage, there’s a preoccupation with the “perfect performance,” which as a working musician I’ve renounced for my sanity. Maybe I’m wrong.

On my mind 3

“Turns out, you really can’t do that,” says Callaghan after illegally crossing into the United States as a US citizen. In the background are carefree Medellín boys who want to end up in Nashville meeting Taylor Swift. There’s a tornado watch here and I rehearsed a putative Handel trio-sonata with AS this morning. When the rent came due I was listening to Taeko Ohnuki again and reading 村上 春樹 — “アフターダーク” and considering the stories that 村上 春樹 tends to tell about women. Are those stories supported by the gendered idol culture of Japanese pop media? How does that culture coexist with manga portrayals of queerness? If I grew up there the answers would be natural to me and possibly as unexamined as xenophobia is in my home culture. — Drawfee put me onto “nightcore” as an umbrella genre containing, arguably, all of kiyosumi even in their new album release. Or, if not “contains,” at least “tangents.” — In the meantime DCFC’s “Plans” (thanks, BC) found me with Adam Young’s emo-tinged vocals and A Beacon School’s sound and synths. Must get ND to compare this latter.

On my mind 2

The bassoonist’s monologues in Shostakovich’s 9th got plenty of room in his recording. He coulda been wearing a stripey sweater and a resigned expression, as one in Bernstein’s orbit — though he’s surely older than he looks. Able performances all around, and I see the sacrifices of control where precision or flexibility might suffer to make the phrase readable. Readability will likely be a theme here for a while — it might be a central hook (control hook) for my anime experience, which four years after watching the first gateway media franchises? will take some doing. Cameron’s work in “Alita” described a good starting point: digital ultra-realism as an expressive language. I got to explain away the pro-forma exaggerations of a manga-inspired visual adaptation and just enjoy the film seriously. (It was long before I would enjoy the gleeful excess of Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen — I only appreciated/enjoyed such magical realism as Death Note and the Ghibli/Miyazaki complex.) It didn’t help that I had parasocial relationships with any and all of my favorite characters; their design was so much more resonant than the writing of the show that I’d struggle to reconcile the two. — In the meantime, I wonder about facilitating the access that makes good taste possible: what good is it to play across leisure cultures like classical music, animation, and storytelling, if the people whom I want to reach with these cultures aren’t yet inclined to try them out? Like AB or JW in their explorations as scholar-performers, I don’t want slack jaws or applause so much as partners to find the “new poetics = expressive language + expressive language + perceptual environment.” Needs refinement.

I certainly wouldn’t reach Nathalie Simper’s studio by talking like that in my class tomorrow. — Though now I have a goal for these paragraphs: to establish a “constellation” of influences for myself. AV would have some ripe comments on humanistic goals, and with Maglaque’s & Yelle’s narratives of Protestant disenchantment I’d stand pinned, limned, guilty as charged.

Christmas present - part 3

Playing with the chorus to notice more stuff about it.

  1. The melodic contour (in green) in bars 3-4 and 7-8, but the rhythm (in blue) references the verse.

  2. Unit C bridging us back to the verse is a more elaborate version of the ending recit. I’d love to start and finish with that recit to bring out the Portuguese and prioritize text in general. Being a producer, ND is probably gonna see this as a missed opportunity, but oh well.

Christmas present - part 2

Since I wasn’t getting much from the lyrics yet, I opted for a first-pass transcription to see if the text suggested any orchestration.

Since I was working from memory of the studio version, the distinction between bassline and upper structures kinda eluded me, so it was a little touch-and-go between (ii7 or IV) and (Imaj7 or iii). No doubt, when I eventually consult the unplugged version, Robin’s gonna throw me a curveball with his guitar voicings. I always noticed those were simpler than the fully-produced versions.

The coda transcribed here like a vocal score really suggests recitative to me. Wondering how I’m gonna make that work.

Christmas present - part 1

Wanted to make the right Christmas present for a pair of outdoorsy friends, and was casting about until I remembered Fleet Foxes’ “Going to the Sun Road,” a song from their most recent original album Shore. It’s enough of a seed kernel for a tangible object and a cover.

Last year, or the year before, I’d made a set of variations for handbell choir, and gifted it to some dear handbell-playing friends. This new cover seems like the right thing to spend a few hours whetting myself on.

I just copied down the lyrics to study.

San Angelo

On a car trip, MAH found a trivia quiz site and asked when Plato died. I proudly guessed the third century A.D. (dead wrong -- it was nearly a millennium before), because I'd been reading about Origen and wanted to talk about antiquity. On the same note, there's an image stuck in my head from Anthony Doerr's "Cloud Cuckoo Land," a novel EK lauded earlier this winter. A girl scratches Greek symbols in the dirt of a public street, instructed by a lean, goitrous scholar that trades her lessons for food. Origen, a my third-century theologian, didn't scratch in the dirt but paid for his studies from the generosity of a sister in Christ. His father had been killed, and his family impoverished, by a Roman raid. Origen's accomplishments as an Alexandrian scholar and Caesarean preacher give me an idea what was going on in those cities. Grateful to keep those windows open by reading and talking about them often.

I'd been driving around San Angelo, TX. There I spent a fair bit of time preparing "In Relig Odhráin: A Musical Exegesis," graciously hosted at Angelo State University by Connie Kelley. It was curious to present such an irreverent recital on the second day of Lent; certainly, it was quite a change of gears from the Ash Wednesday service the night before at FIrst Presbyterian. Too, I had little diddly-bits from West Side Story stuck in my head while teaching it to MAH and playing it in the San Angelo Symphony's movie concert. Socializing with my local friends after that event was quite a treat, as was making some new friends among the orchestra before getting a few hours of sleep before the Sunday service at First Pres. On that service bulletin was written, "Gabriel Fauré, Cicilienne," a charming misspelling that reminds me how fluidly descriptive titles were spelled in 18th century sheet music. (sicilienne-siciliano, jig-gigue-giga, minuet-minuet-minuetto, phantasy-fantasia-fantasia-fantasy)

Before singing Haydn's Creation with the Nashville Symphony Chorus this weekend, on Friday I get to join DMR in concert at Edgefield Baptist. Rehearsing his Nuevo Flamenco challenged me to find my voice outside the "classical sound," something I struggle with even in jam circles where I can hold my own. DMR offered valuable insight.

Odhráin, A Recital

The idea is to write from a place of riches -- if I'm not reading widely enough, my own writing bores me. Conversely, if I'm reading widely and producing responses, a steady trickle of those responses make it onto this platform.

Since the skill of memorization has been an ominous little clockwork dragon sputtering across my kitchen floor (thanks NLD), I decided to put together a memorized solo recital for an upcoming show in San Angelo, TX. Pulled out some old competition rep -- Paganini's fifth caprice, Piazzolla's Tango Etudes, Muczynski's solo flute preludes -- but it felt odd to program without some high-minded "thetical recital" objective. Is it sufficient to put together a show called "What's On my Stand Today?"

Luckily, NLD also gave me an audience when I recited Neil Gaiman's "In Relig Odhráin" on the car ride home from a climbing trip, and that was enough of a jumping-off point to restudy that poem and realize what a shambolic hash I'd been making of it. Trochaic octameter (poets, please correct me here) makes the poem musical enough to get stuck in my head, and its "act structure" feels more natural.

So...a recital structure inspired by Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, where you don’t get the whole poem unless you stick around to the end. Working title, "In Relig Odhráin: A Musical Exegesis."

Muczynski Prelude 1

IRO Stanza 1

Muczynski Prelude 2

IRO Stanzas 1-4

Muczynski Prelude 3

IRO Stanzas 5-6

Berio Sequenza

IRO Stanzas 1-8

Excerpt from Holliger "(T)aire"

IRO Stanzas 1-12

Encore: Bozza "Image"

Of course, calling the recital an "exegesis" is a little spicy. A violent, heretical little ghost story like "In Relig Odhráin" isn't for the faint of heart -- I'll have to attach a mild content warning to the recital if I go through with this idea.

15 Feb

Adding Debussy’s Syrinx to the list, so now we gotta talk about canonical thinking. I’ve got three meanings for the word canon, how about y’all?

CANON (n.)

  1. (ecclesiastical) a high churchman

  2. (almost as ecclesiastical) the established facts of the story, e.g. headcanon

  3. (classical music) a historically standardized body of pieces written for a specific instrument/ensemble

In class with CS, we’d sometimes study mediocre 18th-century compositions. If you’re answering the question, “How do I read music from 1740?” you’d be shooting yourself in the foot by only reading J.S. Bach, who elevated the German High Baroque. You’d get a more balanced perspective on the a priori’s of an 18th-century court musician by reading John Stanley, who wrote a couple of bangers and many more perfectly respectable, average pieces for soloist and continuo. Those never made it into the canon, but they’re still so useful to me.

So if I frame “In Relig Odhráin” against a canonical favorite that every professional flutist knows, Debussy’s little ballet interlude about a nymph and a predatory satyr — thank you, Ovid — is that a productive use of that old saw? Or am I missing an opportunity to present something more recherché but also more apropos (and, heaven forbid, written in the 2020’s)?

19 Feb

Program took shape today after I recited the poem on a hiking trip yesterday — an audience always helps crystallize ideas. I wrote some original material today, too, for Oran’s icy message from beyond the grave.

Let the memorization continue…

Fantasia

More reading for CS: Toni Morrison’s little book, The Origin of Others. In chapter 1, “Being or Becoming the Stranger," she spends a long time quoting nauseating 18th- and 19th-century memoirs of slaveowner atrocity. Then she shifts to the present tense:

“I am in this river place -- newly mine -- walking in the yard when I see a woman sitting on the seawall on the edge of a neighbor's garden.”

I'm learning to recognize this kind of fantasia because CS has pointed it out to me in Michelangelo and Winston Link. But in particular, the novelty of fantasia in academic lectures hasn’t worn off for me since I first began reading Lorca’s “Las nanas infantiles” and rediscovered literary criticism.

"En esta conferencia no pretendo, como en los anteriores, definir, sino subrayar; no quiero dibujar, sino sugerir. Animar, en su exacto sentido. Herir pájaros soñolientos."

["In this forum I don't pretend (as before) to define, but to underline; I don't wish to depict, but to suggest. To animate, in the word's literal meaning, to strike dreaming songbirds." (emphasis added)]

More often than not, when CS tries to get me to notice something new, he doesn't say, Here it is: have a look. He says instead, Go over there: see what you find. And in Morrison's lecture, after extended quotation, there's a sudden change of gears to the present tense, “I am in this river place,” that accelerates us into fantasia, a term that CS uses to combine playfulness, imagination, and indolence.

Fantasia makes a point on multiple levels. "I am in this river place..." Overtly, declaratively, Morrison goes on to talk about assumption and appropriation...but she's also deepening our field of view, pulling it out of focus for a moment so we can't razor out of the the lived experience (and poetic understanding) that underlies her metaphor.

Not too pithy

10 Jan

As things pick up after New Years, I've had caffeinated mornings and steady afternoons of fruitful work. Today marks a few watershed moments: I'll speak with LZ, a flute player whose CD's I heard as a twelve-year-old. I'll audition this evening for a contemporary a cappella vocal ensemble, one of potentially many chamber auditions I'll do over my budding performance career. In the meantime I'm maintaining my journaling/reflections and nibbling on the healthy bookshelf in my living room.

24 Jan

Update: LZ project moves forward, and I got into SONUS! Keep an eye out.

CS mentioned "The History Boys" with his highest recommendation, and the film exposed me to new queer voices lost in a world of symbols. I'm alluding to Ernest Becker here: this week I pulled "The Denial of Death" off Pastor M's bookshelf and started reading about immortality, spurred on by this high-quality video essay (CW: war) that references Becker and Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil." Folks try to cheat death using memory, symbols, and often (as in my case) in the promises of faith.

I'll keep munching on these good works and words.

Picking Up Steam

The more I read, the more I write. No surprise there.

Lately, it's been Marius Kociejowski's A Factotum in the Book Trade, given to me among a box of treasures from my dear CS. The name "Kociejowski" afforded me the chance to remind myself of the Polish ł -- though I'm not sure how he would pronounce it himself, being a Brit through and through. His talking reminds me of James Herriot, the kindly veterinarian diarist from Darrowby.

Near Factotum on my bookshelf is When Memory Speaks, a book that describes how people tell the stories of their own lives. And boy, does CS have some wonderful stories. He has a life, too, and a teaching method, that the world needs to hear about. I got the idea to become a biographer from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, and now, nine months since my return to Nashville, I learn how to listen to someone's life.

BOOKS, MUSIC, FILM

  • Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade

  • Donna Tartt, The Secret History

  • Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

  • Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

  • Keith and Kristyn Getty, "An Irish Christmas"

  • Birdtalker, "One"

  • Langhorne Slim, "Strawberry Mansion - Side A"

  • Langhorne Slim, "Lost at Last"

  • The Beths, "Expert in a Dying Field"

  • W.A. Mozart, Flute Concerto in G Major

  • Paul Thomas Anderson, The Phantom Thread

  • Guy Ritchie, Snatch

Getting back into it

I've wanted to start a blog for months. My Holland update letters, which I tied off last year, were a sort of romanticized journaling project to stay meaningfully in touch with my not-so-near but no-less-dear ones across the Atlantic. But that was a perfect storm: I knew exactly what to share with an audience I loved (and who I knew loved me back).

Having moved back stateside, I've needed long months to catch a new updraft beneath my wings. Deep-rootedness was more my style, and now Nashville is beginning to feel like home.

So I've been reading Bringhurst, and realizing that I really ought to read more biographies. Luckily, Bringhurst would be right up CS's alley, especially with a lecture he gave on Carpaccio's St. Augustine in His Study. Which in turn rhymes with LY's own mention of St. Augustine in our small group meeting last week. She linked me to a couple of sermons and recommended that I take a second look at his Confessions, as well as The Imitation of Christ, which she says is shorter and a better jumping-off point.

But as I sit here with my Earl Grey (half a teaspoon sugar, a teaspoon of cream, please), reading the perfect book and typing up a storm, I realize that the appearance of thriving is not enough for me. All the trappings and creature comforts gave me tangible goals to strive for...here I sit, indeed, in my own apartment with my own furniture, enjoying benefits I couldn't imagine from my lightfooted life in Amsterdam...but truly thriving is something that I'm going to have to figure out for myself, with only my gut and my prayers to guide me.

BOOKS, MUSIC, FILM

  • Bringhurst, "The Tree of Meaning"

  • Ferrell, "Harry S. Truman: A Life"

  • Ross, "Wagnerism"

  • Rodrigo, Concierto Pastoral for flute & orchestra

  • Muczynski, Three Preludes for solo flute

  • Köhler, Romantic Etudes

  • Fauré, Fantasie

  • Mamet, "Glen Garry Glen Ross"