Joy and Music

Writing into the New Year

2012-01-07T14:34:00.001-08:00

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...

2011-12-04T19:49:00.000-08:00

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

2011-04-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-09-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-11-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

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."

Songs

2009-03-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

I just finished listening to the final mixes of the 13 songs that will be on "Musical Moonshine", and I had an interesting experience: I wanted to hear them again. There's much less musicial polish on these songs (all of them were recorded at home with one mic, no mic preamp, three guitars and a mandolin - no other instruments), but they sparkle to me. What's surprising is that these songs have been with me for a while, some of them for anywhere from 3 to 7 years. I have performed them dozens of times, and I haven't gotten tired of them.

There was a real sense of pride in these songs for me. I think they represent the best songwriting I've ever done. Some of them are experimental, while others are very straightforward, but they all work for me on some level.

I also have a better handle on the relationship between song and songwriter this time. I have always felt that songs were like children: you raise them up, and then let them go into the world, hopefully to touch other lives in a positive way. But this set, more than any other, feels like they are a part of me, maybe even a part I didn't know existed. I listen to One-Time Lover, a song about a rambling lothario and realize that - even tho I'm not a rambling lothario - there's a part of me in that cad. Or Washing Away, a stream of consciousness song that I realized yesterday is based in an experience I had four years ago. And the songs that are based on my relationship with Lynda are as simultaneously autobiographical and universal as I think any songs can be.

So it's almost time for me to send these children out to the world. But this batch is perhaps a little more mature and ready for the world than any I've done before, and they make me a very proud papa.

Follow-up to last post

2009-02-11T13:39:00.001-08:00

As promised, I went and spoke to the PEO group. And although they were too kind to say anything or admit it, I fumbled all over myself. What happened is that I started in on the breathing aspect of this idea/theory/mess, and realized (as a woman in the back of the room began to fall asleep) that they were bored, and I had no idea what I was saying. So I shifted gears and skipped directly to the part where I used Mozart as a way of describing what beauty is/was in music.

And I am realizing now that the larger problem here is that there are many directions this conversation has gone with the various people who have been part of it with me. So before I get back up in front of the public again and start to spout this stuff off before it is fully formed, I better have some time to put it all together in my own head.

I walked myself into a teaching corner...

2009-02-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

Last summer, I was asked by someone to teach a short class to a PEO Women's group luncheon. I said yes, she said she needed a title. I said 'how about "A Different Way to Listen to Music". There you go.

Problem is, I can't remember what the hell I was thinking about doing when I said that! The class is tomorrow, and I for the life of me can't figure out what I'm going to tell these women. Anyway, I'm re-reading correspondence I had with a colleague on breathing/phrasing/spirit (which is much too complicated to encapsulate here) to see if it was something related to all of this. I kind of think it was, so I'm going to run with it. First, I'll try out in blog form...

The basic gist of the concept arose from a workshop I gave at a choir directors' conference a few years ago, and it went sort of like this: The essence of musical life, and the essence of singing, is breathing. A musical phrase has the same arc to it that breathing does: a moment of preparation, where life does not exist, followed by a life-giving fill of breath. Once the apex of the breath is reached, a slow recede begins, where the breath leaves the body, slowly and inexorably returning the lungs to their original state.

The genesis of my desire to expound on this idea was a conversation with a friend about how this "breath" can be found in all music: first, it appears in the musical phrase: a string of notes that has a rise and fall, ebb and flow. (As choral singers, we find it most clearly in the way we are called to sing the lines in Renaissance music.) Write large, it also appears in the artistic, narrative arc found in all works: symphonies, novels, plays.

The results of these conversations were many and varied, but some of the tangents I was most interested in included the following: in this model, since life is represented by inhalation, and death represented by exhalation, that means that every musical phrase is a representation of life and death. Furthermore, since everything we say or utter or give to the universe is done on the exhale, our act of speaking and singing itself is representative of dying. When we breathe in, we take from the universe. When we give to the universe, we are partaking in the act of dying. This makes Christ's death on the cross all the more profound, as perhaps the ultimate example one can give in human form of artistic gift.

All of this explosion of philosophical whimsy flew madly between myself and two or three friends, and then it stopped. Stopped on my end, because I had no idea what to do with it. So what? What does it mean?

I'm still not sure I know, but I can say this much today (with a deadline looming): it's time for me to tie this back into musical phrasing, at the very least to try and find a way to teach a class on "How to Listen to Music Differently."

* * * * * * *

So here goes: If this idea is true on any level, it means that a musical phrase that taps into our spirit is one that is basic to our existence. But that does not make a musical phrase beautiful. What makes a phrase beautiful seems to be simply what a phrase does with our expectations of what that phrase does. Beauty in music, as described by countless philosophers and aestheticians, is the act of expectation arrested. When a musical line introduces a slight alteration that we do not expect, it changes what the next expectation is. When Mozart introduces a simple, short dissonance into an otherwise flawless line, we are surprised, titillated. The next time he does it, we now find ourselves listening for beauty in a new way. (If I can find it, I'll put a brilliant quote on this topic by Maynard Solomon here - he says it far better than I can.)

Of course, our expectations are different when we listen to Mozart, or Sinatra, or U2, or at least they should be. And the person who uses one set of expectations to look for beauty in a different piece of music will surely be disappointed. But the process, I think, is the same. We look for the grass, and when we see a flower, we call it beautiful. That's not to say the grass is not beautiful - indeed, if we were walking through a field of tulips and came upon a well-manicured lawn in the middle of it, we would be just as pleased. It's the surprise - the splash of a new color - that makes the beauty.

It's the contrast in the breath that makes the art.

My next CD

2009-01-28T12:50:00.000-08:00

Last night I finished the mixes of the thirteen tracks that will comprise my next CD, and I have to say, I'm very proud of these songs. One of the things that will be very different this time is that the songs will be unadorned - just me and a guitar, with guitar overdubs (solos) on two of the songs. That's it. No bass, no electric guitar, no drums, no keys, no background vocals, no hurdy-gurdy.

As much as I love fleshing out my songs with those ornaments, this time they will be bare. Most of the songs have been performed with combinations of instruments: guitar, cello, violin, vocals, mandolin. I could have recorded them in those states.

But I decided not to do that this time for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, this cuts down the cost of recording for me to almost zero. Second, I think of songs as framing. If I release these songs in bare format, everyone who listens knows exactly what the core of the song is. No bells or whistles or flutes to try and dress up a clinker. Either the song flies or it doesn't, and I have only myself as a songwriter to blame if it doesn't.

Finally, I decided I didn't want to wait for some recording opportunity to release these songs, or hold off until I had a wad of cash that would cover the cost of studio, producer, musicians. My 'back catalog' of unrecorded songs was getting long enough as it was. Indeed, two of these songs were written back in 2001 and 2002. There is a joy in these songs that I wanted to let loose. There is also the tale of a powerful love that weaves its way through many of them, my love for Lynda.

Last year, I thought about taking an extended break from performing. But with that thought process came the realization that "if I don't play these songs, who will?" And I got sad. Sad for these songs. As silly as it sounds, I feel like the work I create is a child of a sort. Once it grows up and moves out, it becomes its own being, able to affect and move people in different ways that I have no control over.

So, here are my new children (in alphabetical order), to be released later this spring to the world of listeners who care to listen:

As I Fall Away
Hold Tight to the Sky
Holding You in the Dark
I Remember You
Nobody Knows
One-Time Lover
Sailor
Simple and True
The Stars Sang a Song
Stranded Ghosts and Devil Dogs
Waiting on the Wind
Washing Away
You Were Leaving Anyway

Apples and Oranges

2009-01-08T15:47:00.000-08:00

The oversimplified version of a conversation yesterday in a meeting at church: It often seems this church is stuck between two models of what churches are supposed to do and act like, and I wonder if this isn't the problem that faces most mainstream churches these days?

Now the overcomplicated version: We, like many mainstream churches, have tried to operate the way we have for five hundred years, with a few modern influences. (Blogging, for instance.) We still have committees (renamed 'teams') that do the majority of the work of the church, and the work itself has changed very little. And yet we struggle to attract and keep members in the 20-40 age range, which means that eventually this church will, like so many of its neighbor churches, die.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose. There has got to be a Darwinian element to this that says that social organizations that cannot evolve with the times should die. Except that the social organizations that too often are taking their place are dogmatic, conservative, judgemental, factional. There has to be a place in this society still for a place of faithful searching for life's answers that is a liberal thinking outpost that rewards inquisitive thought, doesn't there?

So here then was the gist of the discussion - how do we, as a church, honor the old way of doing church business... 'apples', if you will ...while exploring what the liberal church should look like in the 21st century... 'oranges'? How do you make that shift from what is tried and true for the 50-year members of this church to what is needed and untested for the 20-year-old members? I sure don't know the answer, but I'm here to keep looking for it.

So why blog?

2008-12-30T21:43:00.000-08:00

As I have ruminated over my first two posts, I have thought, "so what?" Why would anyone care about my thoughts about music or my Mom, or anything else for that matter?

Here is my question: is there anything that I have learned about music that may help other musicians, or people trying to seek some truth in music? My thoughts on this dwell in two areas: the things that I've studied a lot or taught on a lot. For instance, the importance of Beethoven's symphonies or Bach's fugues on Western civilization. The second area is the stuff that I can't quantify, haven't expressed with words, don't know quite how to say:

Why does music affect us the way it does?

What are the keys for a musician to be able to tap into the emotional power of music?

These are the things I think this blog is here for. This is what I'm going to use this blog to try and answer. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a psychologist. If you want a perspective from either of those places, read Oliver Sachs, or anyone else who has a better idea of the physiology of sound waves reaching the ear, or the psychology of how they affect the brain.

I'm a musician. I'm a musician with a particular insight (not unique to me) from my own experience into the spiritual nature of music and the soul. This is my starting place; this is the approach I will take in trying to open up hearts on these topics. I hope they give you something to think about, and I hope they provide something of interest.

Happy New Year!

Letter to a Young Musician

2008-12-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

I recently wrote this to a gifted young musician:

First, I want to thank you for playing the Bach with us, playing in the orchestra, playing the postlude, for everything you do for the music here at Grace First.

Second, I want to say again how thrilled I am watching and hearing you become such a consummate musician. It's truly a joy to be around you and hear the work you are doing.

Finally, I've been thinking about something you said after the concert. I complimented you on our playing, and your first response was "I missed a lot of notes." Your comment (and a friend asking me this morning "what did you enjoy most about the concert?") got me thinking about why we get involved in music in the first place. (This might get long-winded, and I apologize in advance... I do that sometimes. :-)

My answer to my friend was two-fold. First, I told him that we musicians have all had that experience when everything 'clicks.' It's in tune, it's together, the timing is right, the musicianship can soar,... and when all of that happens, the distractions melt away, and we find ourselves in a place that is almost as close as we can come to touching our true souls, our true selves. It's in these moments that I think God is clearest to us, as musicians, and is why music plays such a central role in worship. And once we've been there once, it's like an addiction. We strive over and over again to recreate that moment - we are constantly working to improve our technique so that we can come closer to finding that feeling, every single time.

The second part of my answer to my friend is that the 'addiction' can be just as dangerous as any other addiction - we become so addicted to finding the technical purity that we lose the most important part of the equation: the unbridled joy that we feel making music. (Let's be honest: making good music is fun.) I know a lot of musicians who are so wrapped up in the pursuit of perfection that they lose the joy along the way. And as a result, they never really attain the perfection, because half of the equation for perfection in music is in releasing all of your inhibitions and just allowing the joy to take over!

OK - so enough metaphysical hoi-polloi. Here's my point: you are a technically superior musician for your age, by anybodies standards. You will only get better on that front. But let go of the idea that every note has to be perfectly in it's place for perfection to occur. Close your eyes more when you play. Learn the music by heart. (Isn't that a great thought? Learn the music by heart.) Enjoy the sounds, live in the vibrations of strings and learn that music - like life - is full of notes that are in tune, and notes that are slightly out of tune. And when you embrace that and find joy in creating music that is in that place, you will no longer be a violinist or a musician...

...you will have become an artist.

I know you will become just that, and I'm thrilled to hear what you will do in the years to come.

Merry Christmas, my friend,
Stan

Music and Mom

2008-12-23T10:18:00.000-08:00

My mother loved music. My memories of her and music fall into two categories - the ones I have of her playing music (or encouraging it in me) when I was younger, and then the ones of my adult years, as I studied music and became a professional musician, composer, director, teacher. The two seemed to be separate memories entirely, of four different people: the person I was as a child and the man I am now; the mother I knew growing up and the mother that I have most recently in my memory - old, frail, dying even. But I now realize that the four distinct people in those memories are two people, perhaps even just one.

I know she sang in the church choir before my earliest memories of her. All Baptist church choirs: first in Wichita, KS, then Denver (where I was born and adopted), then in Fullerton, CA, where I grew up. But by the time I was five, she was a single divorced mother of one, we had left the Baptist church for good, and she never sang in a choir again. I'm not sure if she stopped singing because she associated it with a church she no longer connected with, or if it was some other life situation that took the joy away for her. We never talked about it, or I should say it never occurred to me to ask her.

I do remember, however, an organ, and later a piano. She played it some, though not often. She was not great. Her rhythm was suspect. She talked about having taken lessons when she was younger, and pulled out her old pieces from time to time, mostly just to see if she could still play them. I recall her father (my grandfather) bringing her near to tears one time by asking her to play "Claire de Lune" by Debussy, a piece that she could muddle through. The tears came, she told me later, because she hadn't known that he had even paid much attention to her playing as a young girl, and was shocked when he not only asked her to play his favorite piece of hers, but he named it.

At some point, probably about the age of 8, she bought one of the beginner piano books for me - Thompson, I think. She showed me a few things, and placed a key 'template' on the organ, a little paper cutout with the letter names of the keys that sat between the black keys. It was my first lesson in reading music. For a time, my Mom dated a man who had a daughter that was just a little older than I. She took lessons, and I think I learned as much from watching her play and leafing through her lessons books as I did from Mom. But I didn't have piano lessons until I was in college, and have never been much of a piano player.

I should add at this point that I have always wondered about my relationship to music and how much of it was nature and how much nurture. Given the musical talent in my adopted family, there was not much to watch or learn from musically. My Great Aunt Bill (Willie) played the piano some, but Mom seemed to have gotten her rhythmic gifts from her. My Aunt Mary (Dad's side) sang in the church choir (still does) and fostered music in her children. But that's about it. On the other hand, even an innate musical gift would have languished without encouragement.

And although she never said so directly, it's clear to me that at some point she must have recognized my musicality. Because every opportunity she had to foster, encourage, develop or train my muse she took. When I asked for a drum set, she got me one. When I asked for drum lessons, she paid for them. When my first five drum teachers all flamed out for one reason or another, she found me a sixth one. (We both realized that when teacher number 6 didn't show up for the lesson two weeks in a row that the universe was trying to tell us something.)

At the age of ten, our neighbor across the street cleaned out their garage and pulled down an old cheap Silvertone acoustic guitar and gave it to us. It was ugly - black with a tan sunburst on the front - and crap. One day, while trying to shake the pick out of the sound hole (the curse of every beginning guitarist) I put a six-inch long crack in the back of it. Shortly thereafter, my Mom bought me a lovely classical guitar, a nylon string Yamaha that lasted me into my first years of college. My love affair with the guitar had begun.

I have often been asked when I knew I wanted to be a musician. It's a question that stumps me, because it's never something I consciously chose. As soon as I started playing the guitar, I never looked back. Musical activities (choir, jazz, band, rock bands) took over all of my free time, and athletic ones took a back seat. I've thought in the years since then that I would probably be in better shape now had I played baseball in high school like I threatened to, or learned how to make a jump shot. But the truth is, those things have always felt like pursuits outside of my comfort zone, whereas music has been my home - it is who I am. Perhaps I left my adoptive mother behind at some point in those early years of studying music, as if music took over its rightful spot as my true parent and guardian. And if that is true, it explains much of the tension that existed between us as adults.

* * * * * * *

I think, on some level, my mother never really understood my relationship to music. Appreciated, yes. Admired, yes. Sponsored and supported, absolutely. But understood? She would often ask me questions about a composition of mine, and ask something like "where do you come up with the idea for something like that?" or "how do you think of which notes to use?" It's not a question that can really be answered, and anyone who writes music knows that. You can say something like, "well, it's mostly just about picking notes out of a scale that sound right and matching them together - you know, like Lego blocks!" Or go the philosophical route and say, "I don't really write the notes, they just kind of come through me. I'm more of a conduit."

But the truth is, I have no idea. I can't explain it. I can't explain what happens when notes all work, or why some combinations of notes produce certain reactions or emotions, and if I tried too hard to think about it, I think the magic would disappear. It would be like thinking so hard about how the car works that I'd never be able to get to the store. And I would tell her that, but she never was satisfied with that answer.

And I'm not saying this because her view is wrong and mine is right, it's just that I don't think she honestly understood what I meant. I say all of this because I think music is probably the one evidentiary reminder I have had my whole life that I was adopted. And that saved me on occasion. My Mother was a wonderful woman, but she was - as are all of us - flawed, afraid, unable to forgive herself for too much. And as an only child and, later on, and only adult child, there were many times when the weight of that emotional attention would have been debilitating...

...except that I had music. Music that I could escape into; music that I could wallow in, music that I could create and call my own creation for the world to hear, whether that be a performance or a composition. There was never a moment in my life when I didn't love my mother or wasn't grateful for all of the sacrifices she made for me. But there were times, too many times I am sad to admit, that I dove into my career as a way to establish in my mind that her neuroses were not my neuroses. It is, undoubtedly, my greatest failing as a son.

But in the end of her life, as her health faded and her days clicked off the calendar, there was one fact that helped her the most - she had raised a successful son who just happened to make music for a living. She truly was proud of me and my accomplishments. Her neighbors had all heard music of mine, and spoke at length about how she talked of me every time they came over.

When I was in Oregon after her death, taking care of the estate, I was making the rounds one day from place to place. In my errands, I went to her Savings and Loan to take care of some financial paperwork. I met one of the Account Execs, and proceeded to sit down and tell her what I needed. When she asked my mother's name, my response was greeted with "Oh, you must be Stan!" She then continued to tell me how much they knew of me and how proud my Mom had been. I blushed.

Since her death, I've been aware that she may have, indeed, not understood my music. But I also know now that it didn't matter. She understood it in the way only a mother could. I think she was most fond of my vocal music and my singing, maybe because she could relate to it from her days in the Baptist church choir. My guitar, which has always felt the most home for me, was of less interest to her, I think. It was when she heard my orchestral music, though, that the questions about "where does that music come from" always arose.

* * * * *

So what does all of this mean? Probably not much, except for two things. First and simplest, this Christmas I need to grieve my mother's death, and writing all of this out cathartically gives me the chance to do that.

Second, I am aware (partly out of trying to figure out ways to answer my mother's questions) that I have much to say about music and why it is what it is and why it does what it does. I've gotten much better at explaining it over the years. I have tried over the last few years to write more about music, to use what I think I know about it to inform some sort of book/article/epic poem about the muse.

I woke up last night realizing that I could kill two musical byrds with two rolling stones on this one and use my memories of my Mother as a starting place for all sorts of music musings and observations.

So, Mom, this blog's for you.

Oh, and I miss you very much. Merry Christmas.

Love, your son.