Writing into the New Year

This is the kind of post that could come back to haunt me at some point, but I feel confident enough in it at this point that I am willing to throw it out into the universe.

The next stage of my musical and intellectual evolution involves writing, I know that. It is why I started this blog, to give me a space that was easy enough to access and public enough that I would have to force myself to write (and post) only what I can stand behind. Whether or not anybody reads is a different matter. What is important is that I go through the exercise of articulating the ideas and theorems that invade a musician's mind.

So for 2012, I am setting goals for myself: I will carve out space and time for myself to write; I have set up the home office to better accommodate it; I will wake up earlier each morning and endeavor to not do anything else before I sit down and write each morning. (Sorry, Roscoe - your walks are now at 8 a.m.) And, I am going to continue studying with W.A. Mathieu into the new year.

What I write is of lesser concern to me at this point. I need to learn (or develop) the discipline of writing something every day. It may be song lyrics, it may be prose, it may be notes on manuscript paper. But it will be something.

Last weekend, we spent some time with some dear friends in Portland. One of them had decided that she wanted to find a word to describe the way forward in the coming year. Hers was "boundaries", as in setting personal ones and expanding creative ones. Lynda, after thought, is looking for "balance" or "consistency." I originally was going with "forward", but after reflection, that seems too vague.

So for this year, it's simple. My word is simply, "WRITE."

A Church Musician Should...

Back in the day, when I was in college, the path of study for someone who wanted to be a church music director was aimed entirely at choral music. The Choral/Vocal degree was the best way to get from point A to point B. A student would study vocal pedagogy, choral repertoire and sing the choral classics, from Palestrina to Brahms. It would leave gaping holes in liturgy and theology, but that was something you could pick up later, or so it was assumed.

I should preface this by saying that I had no intention of going into church music when I graduated. My first goal was a studio guitarist, but when I graduated, 'college professor' seemed more likely. I flirted with film scoring, playing in a touring folk band and writing educational materials, before church music kind of fell in my lap. At the age of 43, I took my first and only class in Reform Theology, along with 24 Sunday school teachers from the deep South. It was all I needed to add to my knowledge base for the job.

But everything I truly needed to know about church music I never learned in college. Or in a classroom with a bunch of Sunday school teachers. I learned it in the cross-pollination of subjects I experienced while writing film scores, writing educational materials, or touring in a folk band. What I learned is that the demands of a church musician require the ability to see the connection between an infinitely diverse panoply of topics.

For starters, the traditional "church choir director" role is gone, or is going away. In it's place, anyone who wants to have a serious church musician post is going to have to be conversant in choral, orchestral, handbell, rock, jazz and folk music. An ability to play piano is still a must, as is the ability to play guitar, sub for your bassist when he's sick, communicate violin bowings and flute embouchures, and sit down at the drum set when your praise band needs it. You'll have to be able to arrange hymns for children's choirs, write out orchestral scores, explain what a m7(b5b9) chord means to the guitar player, and help your organist work out a continuo part.

In addition, it will be helpful if you know the difference between a dynamic and a condenser microphone, know how to set-up EQ at the sound board and record a saxophone, and what to watch for in a contract for a touring musician. You may be required to set up an art show, a film series, a book group and organize your choir's tour to Spain.

Oh, and you need to know how to direct a choir. ...and do it well.

The glaring deficiencies of my college education were apparent to me early on, so none of this came as a surprise to me when I started my job at Grace First. I had long bemoaned the fact that anyone could be allowed to graduate with a bachelors and a masters degree and never have anybody explain the terms "performing rights organization," "royalty," or what a musician's union actually did. (I'm still not sure I know that last one.)

But what saved me was the fact that I dabbled in all of those things I mentioned earlier. Booking a choir tour was easy because I've booked my own. Recording CDs with my band helped me understand how to record the church band, and how to maneuver our digital sound board. I had been playing handbells for years before I first started directing a group. Teaching in a classroom gave me the tools I needed to be able to explain Handel's Messiah to my choir.

The key is, I did as much as I could and learned everything I possibly could. Not having a focus meant that there were times I never reached the top of a given field of music; for instance, I never became a full-time studio musician.

I think a lot of people today wait around trying to figure out their career path, waiting to "find their bliss." I've learned that you don't find your bliss by waiting for it to come to you. You find it by doing as many things as you possibly can.

And you become a good church musician by learning and doing as many things as you possibly can.

Pride - comma - in the name of love

U2 had a hit song twenty years ago called "Pride in the Name of Love", which was loosely based on Martin Luther King. It's a great song, one I've always loved.

But today I want to add punctuation to it: Pride, in the name of love.

I've watched Lynda worked over the last few years I've known her, and felt the love (obviously), and felt the pride. The pride comes up when she tells her story, when people understand what she's overcome and what she's retained or learned from it.

Today I added the comma.

I realized that the pride I feel for her (or more accurately, the pride I feel being married to her - let alone even knowing her), is because what she does is create love where it didn't exist before. Or maybe..., not "didn't exist", but "wasn't evident." She sees a need, and creates the means for peoples' natural propensity for loving and caring to come forth.

Think about it: what she did today (or last year, at the first Taste at the Point), was create the opportunity for hundreds or people to care for those in our midst who are hurting or in pain.

A 72 year old woman with breast cancer that has now had it reappear in her pelvic bone was there today, brought by her daughter who read about in the paper. She was connected with the support groups that were there, that will give her counseling. If you forget the thousands of dollars that were raised to day that will go to women in need, you can know that today was all worth it, if only because of that 72 year old woman.

So, yes, I am proud of this woman - who is currently sitting behind me on the couch, eating dessert bars. But I am proud of her for what she does in the name of love.

October 1963

In October of 1963, four lives collided in a very significant way. First, Ellen Brooks gave birth to a baby boy, listed on the hospital rolls as "Baby Boy Brooks," in a Denver, Colorado hospital. Then, a young couple was informed that their wish to adopt a child would come true: a young boy had been given up for adoption by an unwed mother, and the paperwork would soon proceed for him to be their son. And so it was that I was given up for adoption by my birth mother and adopted by a young couple, Jack and Betty Joan DeWitt.

There are three stories here. They all have their own trajectory, but in a brief span in 1963, they intersected, to bounce away from each other and not rejoin in any way until 2009.

* * * * *

Ellen's story: As she tells it now, she grew up in Wyoming, an only child whose father fought with American troops in World War II. After several years overseas, he wrote back to his wife that he had fallen in love with a French woman, and would not return to the U.S. after the war was over. His American wife was a strong woman with a saving sense of humor. So she set about making a life for her and her young daughter in Wyoming, spurning the advances of cowboys who felt a divorcee needed a man.

Ellen grew up enjoying music, thinking at one point that she wanted to be an opera singer. She says that once she entered high school she discovered booze and boys, and decided "maybe jazz singer would be better." She never did study music, or follow it as a career, but the seed of the musical life had been planted within her. At seventeen, she married and moved to Denver. Soon thereafter, she gave birth to a girl.

But another seed had been planted in Wyoming, one that would bear dark fruits. She began to drink more and more, and by the time she was twenty, she was divorced, estranged from her daughter, and completely lost down an alcoholic abyss. It is possible she may have lost one child during this time. But she will say that she regards those years of her life as lost ones, with vast expanses not in her memory.

In 1963, she discovered she was pregnant again. Whatever the reason, this time was different. Something clicked within her, and she vowed to sober up and give birth to a healthy child. She also realized, in a burst of sanity that was rare for her life at that time, that she would have to give up the child for adoption to a family that could raise it and provide for it. After the birth, she moved to New York, where she lived and worked in Manhattan and Rhode Island for many years before remarrying and moving back to Wyoming. She has been sober for 47 years and counting.

At the same time, a couple from Wichita, Kansas was contemplating adoption. They were nearing their 30's, and determined (for reasons that are now unknown) that they would not be able to conceive a child of their own. Theirs had been a reasonably picture-postcard marriage to that point, although signs of strain were evident. But they were happy in their new home in Denver. All they needed to complete the picture was a baby, something that could only be provided through adoption.

So Ellen Brooks gave birth to a baby boy that one month later, on November 22, 1963, was adopted by Jack and Joan DeWitt. Joan often told her boy that the significance of that date for her was powerful and two-fold: it was not only the day that he entered their lives, it was the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She often told him that she felt that Kennedy's arrested promise was somehow fulfilled in him. (He usually rolled his eyes whenever she told him that later in life.)

Their happy family life was not all that happy. Jack and Joan fought, a lot. And only four short years later, after a move to California, they split up. Jack tried to stay, but eventually moved back to Kansas. Joan raised the boy, and did a remarkably good job, considering.

Considering. She was a single mother trying to eke out an existence for two in an era that was not kind to such women or their children. She never held a job for too long; the longest the boy can remember is 8 years. She struggled with bouts of emotionalism that, in retrospect, were probably symptoms of bi-polar disorder. He remembers one fight where she threw a pan at him, missing. She never remembered the fight. She fought incessantly with her parents and, perhaps most of all, her only sister. The sisters shared a love-hate relationship that persisted without relent up to the day she died. The boy grew up, and spent much of his adult life learning to find himself amidst the wreckage of all of it, and yet somehow he did.

He married, perhaps not wisely. He was successful to a point as a musician. The seeds that had been planted by Ellen Brooks had flowered, and those flowers saved him. For it was in music that he found himself, found his voice, found his calling. In 2005, his marriage ended, but it was really the beginning of a path of self-discovery that unearthed in short order: sexuality, career, love, maturity, and finally - a family history.

Joan died on September 29, 2008, after a series of strokes. Jack had died in Raytown, Missouri in 1985. The boy, now a man, was with her at the last, only flying home when there was no more time to stay. He was not with her when she died. The following May, the man and his girlfriend flew back to Colorado to scatter her ashes in the Rockies. Her final resting place is atop a small hill overlooking a stream, with a view of the snow-capped peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park beyond.

Just two months after that trip, the man received an e-mail stating that the State of Colorado had passed a law saying that anyone born before 1969 could now receive their original birth certificate. He got it, and with an hour of research on the internet, found Ellen Brooks, now Ellen Green.

When he called, her first question was "are you happy?"

* * * * *

I am writing all of this because - perhaps obviously - I am that boy. And now, almost 47 years later, I am sitting in Denver, Colorado. Today I traveled this city's streets and wondered how they looked different in 1963. Tomorrow, my wife and I will drive to Casper, Wyoming to see Ellen (Brooks) Green. It will be my second meeting with her, and the first time my wife and her will meet.

This all seems like it is someone else's story. I couldn't be the guy who was given up at adoption, and found his birth mother 46 years later, the guy who took his adoptive mother's ashes back to Colorado only to speak for the first time with his birth mother three months later, after searching with her for only an hour. I can't be the guy who is sitting in a hotel room in Parker, CO who has spent his whole life digging for some connection with someone to find it in a woman he's only met once living in a state he has never stepped foot in. But I am.

Surely this is an "Oprah" episode. The man who is writing this is sitting there on her couch, and Oprah prods him with moving questions until tears well up in his eyes, and then she introduces his mother who they have just found and "wait, there's more!" out comes his half sister, a sister he never even knew he had. Surely this will be someone else's happy ending?

What this all means, in the end, is going to take more years to sort out. I didn't know what I would feel when I picked up the phone to call her a year ago, nor when I drove to meet her the first time. I'm not sure I know after the fact. The emotions have bounced between extremes: excitement, apprehension, relief, sadness, joy. But none of them have lasted very long. When one emotion appears, another follows in short order.

I guess there's two things I can say for sure; one is that this is surreal. Imagine that you have one set of realities that last for 46 years. And even though you know it isn't the entire story, imagine discovering a second reality after all that time changes your perception of what "reality" is. I thought this trip would take away some of that surreality, but the truth is there is almost more now.

Reality is what we perceive it to be, nothing more. All I can ask of my mind is to continue to expand perceptions and change what is possible. I hope that by the time I leave this dimension, I will at the very least have an larger view of what is real and true than I do today. And if I do, I will have three people to thank (amongst many others) for it: Betty Joan DeWitt, Jack DeWitt, and Ellen Green.

The second thing I can say for sure? Through all of the ups and downs that my life has held, it has been a very good life. To answer Ellen's question, "yes, I am happy."

Can Church Music Be Hip?

Andrew Sullivan recently hosted a series of posts inviting people to write in and discuss whether church music can be "hip." I really enjoyed the series of posts, largely because I have been wrestling myself with music in worship: both what makes a piece of music effective in worship and what makes any piece of music "hip." (The summary of the Sullivan posts can be found here.)

As I read the posts, I found myself thinking a bit more about the music that I am drawn to for worship, and why I tend to steer clear of "praise music." The questions I kept coming back to were: is there something that really separates the music that I am drawn to? Is there really something definably 'hip' about any piece of music?

I grew up in a family that was Baptist on all sides. As we got older, some of my family entrenched themselves in Baptist theology, while others drifted even farther to the right. But my immediate family went driftless for a time. First, my Aunt moved to San Francisco. Then, my Mom and Dad followed to California, and after their divorce, Mom stopped attending church for good. I don't know if she felt scarred by her Baptist past or not, but I certainly reeled as a teenager, when I discovered that the world was not all it I had been taught it was.

So I must admit that I have a long-time hair-trigger response to anything that remotely smacks of religious intolerance. And it's not that the "praise music" that's heard in most churches is intolerant in any way. But it does remind me of those churches.

So why is that? What is about them that hits me that way? Why do I sense something in them that I can only describe as disingenuous? And what is it about a song like Johnny Cash's rendition of "Ain't No Grave", or even Jars of Clay's "Flood" that doesn't trigger it?

I think it has to do with the way the sentiment is portrayed in the song. If I feel someone is trying to sell me something, I stop listening, much in the same way I hang up on a telemarketer. I don't consciously do it; I just sense that the emotion is unauthentic, and I am turned off to it.

To put it another way, if someone sings to me "I love God with all my heart...", I immediately want to stop listening. But if someone sings to me "I see God in a patch of mushrooms...", no matter how bad the music might be, I keep listening.

It's about depth. If someone tells me they love God, or asks me to do the same, there's no depth in that sentiment. But if we sing about God in a field of flowers, or in a full moon, there are surprises in store; if a song talks about how hard it is to find God when the world is falling down around you, that is a depth of emotion that I can relate to; if a song makes me think or feel differently about God or the universe, then that song is worth my time.

One night many years ago, I was finishing up a night playing at a small coffeehouse. I was alone that night, packing up my car after the gig when I was approached by a young man who had been chatting outside. Earlier, I noticed that there was a group of folks from a nearby church that had gathered for Bible study; I remember thinking that my songs must have provided a strange accompaniment for them. But they enjoyed it and were very complimentary.

The young man started out by saying he liked my songs, and noticed that they had a spiritual side to them. I was impressed that he had paid any attention at all, but he was just getting going. Within a minute, he was full into his routine, trying to save me and get me to Accept Jesus Christ as My Personal Lord and Savior.

I explained to him that I already attended another church - worked there, actually - and I wasn't interested in what he had to say. He persisted. I engaged him for a bit, debating what I felt was a very narrow reading of what or who God was. When he tried to get me to see the logic in his way of thinking by saying, "look, what is 2 plus 2?", I snapped.

"Are you kidding me? You are not going to try and reduce the complexity of the universe and humanity to a simple mathematical equation, are you?"

He sensed that he had gone too far, and backpedaled. Within another minute, he was gone, and I was happily pulling out of the parking lot.

But that interaction still sits with me to this day. Anytime I sit through a sermon or read a bumper sticker or hear a song that tries to reduce the complexity of God's creation to a slogan or a hook, I shudder. But when I hear Regina Spektor, who has absolutely no vested interest in selling a "praise" song, sing the following words, I know that I have glimpsed God in a new, exciting, terrifying, funny, and alarming way:

"No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor
No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God
When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else
And they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at God
When the cops knock on their door
And they say we got some bad news, sir
No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine or fire or flood

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
Ha ha
Ha ha

Now, that is hip.

Guerrilla Love

It's time we take our society back. We are in a battle for the heart and soul of our culture, and it's time we take it to the streets. I urge you to join me in an effort to win over the hearts and minds of those who oppose us. It will be hand to hand, and it won't be pretty. But I'm convinced it's the only way.

It's time to engage in Guerrilla Love.

This is not a guerrilla war. The goal is different, but the tactics are the same. Here are the techniques we will use in our fight for guerilla love:

Memorials - We will honor those who have come before us with plaques. Not bronze, necessarily, but cardboard or paper - what ever you have handy. Wherever someone has committed an act of senseless beauty or random kindness, return to that spot with your 'plaque' and memorialize the act: "October 16, 2009 - On this spot, a young college student gave up his parking place for an elderly couple." "This is where a stranger came to prepay his neighbor's groceries."

Drive-bys - We will commit drive-by acts of guerrilla love. Small moments, like a wave or a smile, yes. But we will also commit bigger, much more powerful acts, such as stopping to wish an old lady a nice day, or stopping to put flowers on a doorstep. We will be a gang of love.

IEDs - Improvised Expressions (of Love) Devices - We will create devices that will detonate love and kindness all over those who encounter them: boxes of small gifts, remote-control perfume-release contraptions, surprise expressions of love for random strangers.

Honor the Foot Soldiers - We will honor those foot soldiers in our guerrilla love struggle by honoring them: the hairdresser who knows and loves all of her customers, the policeman who lets the driver go with a warning, the minister who refuses to preach a gospel of hate, the teacher who stays late to help one child with math. These are the true heroes in our struggle for love.

Fight the System - We will copyright the phrase "Guerrilla Love", expressly for the sole purpose of not enforcing the copyright, specifically so no one else will ever profit from our guerilla love.

These are our tactics, this is our credo. We will fight for love and beauty and justice and truth everywhere. Will you join me in my guerrilla love?

An exercise

You are driving in your car, and you pull up to a stoplight. Just before the light changes, another car pulls up next to you. You look over a look at that person as your sheltered, automobiled lives cross each other for an instant. It may be a man, maybe a woman - it doesn't really matter. Make it anyone you want for the purpose of this exercise. The light changes and you both zoom off on your individual ways. Maybe you'll see that person again, maybe you won't.

Now imagine being with that person in their car. Have a conversation with them. Who are they? What are their fears, hopes, dreams? Where are they going? What are they feeling? Do you like them? Does it matter? What do you see when you look over at your car from their perspective?

We live in a complex society. We all fly about in our own lives, driving like the devil, worrying about our schedule and our pocketbook, not thinking about the people like us in the car next to us, only three feet away. In the movie Crash, the Los Angeles lifestyle is given a brutally honest (and depressingly tragic) treatment where people are forced out of the comfort zone of their automobiles and into an uncomfortable relationship with the drivers next to them.

Our lives form a cross-connecting polyphony of different arcs and trajectories, different keys and rhythms, different modes of expression. And yet we really all share a very similar story, rooted in a common culture, with similar fears, goals, and the realization that - when all is said and done - this musical journey we call life will someday come to and end.

This is why Bach is important. There is no simplicity in Bach. His music is the music of complexity and interconnectivity. If we allow ourselves to get inside of Bach's music, he can show us the weaving fabrics of our lives' melodies. And we can begin to understand that the resulting harmony and texture of those melodies is the music of the cosmos, a glorious consonance and dissonance that exists for one reason only: in Bach's words: Soli Dei Gloria. "Only for the glory of God."