My Worst Musical Performance Ever (Updated)

(Note: I left an left out an important part of this story, which I have now added.)

I was in seventh grade. Must have been about 12 years old. I had been playing the piano since age 6, and sometime in middle school I started accompanying the concert choir. Usually this task was divided among three or four different players; no one had more than one or two pieces to play. That year, my piece was a silly word play about various composers like Bach and Liszt, an attempt to elevate people by stooping to their level. It doesn’t work.

I don’t remember what happened exactly, but in the middle of this stupid piece, I completely fell apart, lost my place, stopped playing—leaving the chorus to trudge along a cappella. I was mortified. What could be worse? The problem with performance etiquette these days is that both performers and audience are supposed to pretend that everything is okay, even if it isn’t. If you’re listening to a performance that sucks, you still have to clap at the end, and if you’re a performer who’s laying an egg, you still have to stand up and take a bow. I found this to be the most humiliating part of all, having to stand up and take a bow after playing so badly that even the local high school band director or even a church organist would have known there were mistakes. I would rather have crawled into the piano.

Then my father pulled out a bloody camera. Right there from the front of the auditorium, I gestured defiantly and yelled, “Put that down!” He was furious with me. Strangely, the applause continued as if my unusual outburst had never happened. My father hasn’t taken a picture of me since that night. I understand why he was annoyed, but I don’t think he realizes, either, how I felt: He was about to make a record of the worst musical moment of my life.

That was a rough night, but it only got worse the next day. My section was standing outside the English classroom, waiting for the previous group to finish so that we could go in. One of the girls in my section verbally attacked me. “Thanks a lot. You ruined our concert.” I was too young at the time to realize that this was total b.s. for  a number of reasons. First of all, one piece doesn’t ruin a whole concert. Secondly, this little brat didn’t even play the piano. She couldn’t have done my job if she had all the desire in the world, but that never crossed my mind. So I was affected deeply by this. I felt like someone punched me in the gut. I have since learned that such behavior is often a factor of jealousy. A quick glance at the work of certain music critics lends credence to this theory. Not only that, I have also discovered that the greater a musician a person is, the more generous he or she is in the evaluation of another’s work.

There is a certain vulnerability in making music. It takes place in time; the musician cannot fix, adjust, or reconsider in the manner that a painter can, for instance. Doubtless painters have challenges that musicians don’t; in any case, this is the challenge that musicians have. (I know of one surgeon who claims that musicians have greater time-related pressures than he does.) I have lost track of the number of times I came within a fingernail of completely falling apart. And yet, sometimes it is those same “hang ten” kinds of performances that are enflamed with the fire of inspiration. It’s the kind of trade-off that Babe Ruth, who held records both for home runs and strike outs, would gravitate to.

But for a long time, I learned the wrong lesson from this worst performance, and I developed performance anxiety. We all have our own battles, and this has been one of mine. The truth of the matter is that too much anxiety chokes off musicianship, and it’s precisely because the performer is concerned about many things, but not about the most important thing. I get nervous when I worry about what people will think, but when I play for the love of music, that is when the great performances happen. In the era of Like buttons on Facebook, this task only becomes more difficult, but if music is to survive this Technological Dark Age (we have many gadgets but few books) that we are in, we musicians must resist what is essentially egotism and dedicate ourselves to the elucidation of the ideas expressed by our art. With any other approach we are simply letting the inmates run the asylum.

Band Camp Nightmares

I graduated from high school fifteen years ago. Life since then has gone relatively smoothly, except for one thing: Usually in late August, I have the annual band camp nightmare. There is no specific plot, nor are there consistent characters in this occurrence. But I’m at band camp, and that’s bad enough.

Most people think of marching bands as being good only for football cheerleading purposes, and they are right. The problem is that band directors would also think the same thing were it not for the dreadful festivals known as band competitions. Each school shows up, plays its ditties, and is awarded points based on various subcategories which I will not enumerate so as not to bore you to death. The trouble with this is that for most band directors this is the be-all and end-all of their entire program, perhaps because they are trying to out-do the athletic coaches by being something they’re not. Students who do not put on the comical semi-military uniforms are often marginalized in the rest of the instrumental music program.

The average band student does not know any more about music than anyone else. If you want your child to be cultured you’d be better off sending him to the chorus or getting him painting lessons. Most band directors, however, are not going to bother with any music that can’t be degraded into a cheer or a raucous company front.

No, the purpose of marching bands is not to culture our children; it is to teach them to sit down and shut up and do what they’re told. Marching bands, as you may know, are based on military culture, and that’s pretty self-explanatory. It all dawned on me one day when I got back from a five-week retreat, where I, along with a number of others chosen from throughout the state of Pennsylvania, were chosen to explore our talents more thoroughly. We were treated like adults, we were told our expectations, and then we were turned loose. Amazingly, no one died.

I got back from that retreat two days before band camp started. There was, shall we say, friction, which came to a head. The band director told me to just “be a kid,” and then when I graduate I can go off to some music conservatory to “drink or smoke,” or whatever it is that I need to do to become a good musician. Bitter, much, Herr Direktor? The funny thing is that the last thing at a school that’s childlike is the marching band. It comes the closest to Orwell than any other activity I can think of. A wide receiver can break his pattern to make a big play, a forward can streak down the basketball court for a spectacular dunk, but a member of a marching band has his place, and better well stay in it. Each is turned into a human-shaped object.

Band kids are known for being dorks and wimps, and having been one, I think I have the right to say that this is largely true. What kind of timidity, after all, does it take to submit to such regimentation?

As a musician, I worry most about what marching bands do to the public perception of musical art. I once asked a band parent about their director. She replied that he’s really good, exhibit A being that he can combine the color guard moves with the marching band in really neat ways. Not exactly what I was looking for. You see, it’s fine with me if most band directors want to be stupid, but the problem is that it makes their students and their students’ families stupid. Most marching band members wouldn’t know Mozart or Beethoven if they came back from the dead and ripped the plumes off their little Viking helmets. This is a cultural poverty. Playing ditties does not make one musically educated.

Not all band directors are like this, but I have to say that most of the ones I’ve met are. In their defense, they’re the ones that fit the demand placed on them by the ruling booboisie. This situation is, in a way, helplessly circular—unless the band director has the imagination and the drive to re-shape the prevailing mentality.  I met one director in Maryland some years ago who told me that they play the five home football games each Fall, and then the clown uniforms go back into the closet. He ran one of the best programs in the state. No coincidence, methinks.

Something funny has happened this year. I have not had the annual band camp nightmare. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining. I suppose I can only thank those teachers I’ve had who enabled me to get out of the marching band milieu. Maybe they indirectly taught me to resist the sadder societal trends in general. Marching band, after all, is the perfect training for an obedient worker who votes for Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke and all the while takes pride in his ignorance.

I have friends who are band directors, who are trying to be real educators and not just poor imitations of coaches. I wish them all the best. I, for one, however, am glad to be far away from it all.

I need a drink.

 

Neue Bahnen

It is conventional wisdom these days that serious music making is in trouble.  The public doesn’t support it.  The orchestras are going broke.  Everyone listens to music on their iPods while real musicians starve.  This is mostly rubbish, and it is only more apparent to me as I think about two events I attended this weekend.

Friday night saw the return of the Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra to Chris’s on Sansom St. in Philadelphia.  I knew Lars Halle way back when I had hair and hadn’t yet gotten off the trumpet. (Eleven years clean now, with only one relapse in June 2005.)  I was only too glad to reconnect with him and his ensemble when I moved to Philadelphia a few years ago. Lars drives the band from the drum set and surrounds himself with some of the best talent in the area.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and if this is true, then classical musicians are a loyal lot, performing Bach and Mozart in as correct—and sometimes even inspirational—a way as possible.  There is value in breathing life into the dry bones of long-dead geniuses.  I do my best at it most days of the week.  But the jazz musician has what is arguably a higher calling:  making music on the spot.   A basic rhythm and chord progression holds the structure of the music together while a soloist improvises.  The virtuosity of the musicians may be the most obvious thing to the casual observer, but the musical inspiration is what I pay the most attention to.  It takes brains to do this, and also a capacity to yawp about the mysteries of the universe.  The greatest danger about historicism in art is that the artist will cease to have something to say, but as long as there are musicians who improvise, this is less likely.

I improvise a lot on the organ these days, but my initial instruction in this skill actually came from a jazz musician from Boston while I was a trumpet player.  He once brought down a house filled with hippies and atheists with a little tune called Everybody Ought to Know Who Jesus Is, played on his white baby grand piano.  I went into his studio one day and said I was tired of not being able to improvise.  He wrote out a blues scale, sat down at the piano, and turned me loose.  I remember two things he said from that lesson: 1) “Nothing’s worse than somebody who talks all the time but never says anything.” (I now save such blabbering for this blog.) 2) “I don’t care if you’re playin’ Johann Sebastian BACH! It’s got to groooooove!” From that day, I have never felt like I’m fully a musician unless I’m improvising.

There are musicians who can improvise so well that it sounds like a finished piece, except for the fact that the blood courses through the veins of the listener with more vigor, a sharing in the ecstasy of the performer.  They say that Bach could do this.  So could many French organists.  And no one beats these jazz musicians.  The student of music can always figure on a shot of new energy from hanging out with them.

The Lars Halle Jazz Orchestra is just as good as a major symphony orchestra, except that if you sit at the bar at Chris’s you’ll only have to pay five bucks to hear them.  If you want dinner the cover will cost you fifteen, but you’ve got a seat for the whole three hour performance.  The availability of spirits makes it even more enjoyable.  It’s not as crowded in the summer, since so many people are at the beach, but if you want a decent vantage point for one of these performances during the rest of the year, you better get there early.  Usually it’s standing room only.  This isn’t exactly the sign of a dying art form.  Some would take issue with my lumping jazz in with “serious music,” but they probably need to come out from behind their late 19th century fortress.  Even Richard Weaver thought that jazz was bad music and contrasted it mercilessly with Mozart, showing his ignorance of both styles.  Oh well.  We can’t all be right about everything.

Saturday night brought an experience even more contemporary and no less thrilling.  The Crossing, a choir that performs music of the 21st century, is in the middle of its Month of Moderns, which this year features a number of settings of text by and about Seneca, the Stoic philosopher of yore.  (Do all philosophers have names that begin with an S?)  This particular concert featured works by Kile Smith, a composer from Philadelphia, Kamran Ince, who spends much time in Instanbul, and Gabriel Jackson, resident composer for the BBC.  A review of the concert can be read here.

Kile Smith’s new work commissioned by The Crossing, The Waking Sun, comprised the first half of the concert.  Written for chorus and the baroque ensemble Tempesta di Mare, the third (on a text about Cupid), fourth (on a text about Tantalus), and sixth movements (a beautiful love poem) seem to me to be of particular beauty.  ”I am usually a grudging participant in standing ovations,” I told Kile after the performance, “but tonight I only wished that I were a foot taller.”  (Full disclosure: I am friends with most of the people involved in this performance.  This is not an “objective” review, but what review is?)  In the second half, Kamran Ince’s Theystes featured a gruesome text about cannibalism, and Gabriel Jackson’s Not No Faceless Angel featured a poem about death that was mature beyond the years of the writer.

Turnout for concerts by The Crossing is consistently solid, but Saturday brought a standing room only crowd, perhaps the best showing ever.  Unlike  some concert patrons, however, those who come to Crossing concerts are there not to be seen to but hear, to listen to the music.  They are intelligent listeners: Usually, in any crowd, there is one wiseacre who insists on applauding the millisecond a piece ends, even if it ruins the atmosphere of a performance.  These people want everyone else to know that they know when something is over.  This is one of the reasons that the classical music milieu annoys normal people. This doesn’t happen at Crossing concerts; the whole room is still until conductor Donald Nally has relaxed his posture.  What’s more is the constructive conversation that takes place at the post concert receptions—about the composer, the text, the sound of the choir, whatever.  Just as there are “C and E” Christians, there are “Messiah and Beethoven 5″ audiences; but the Crossing audiences are true believers.

As an audience member I find each of these concerts to be challenging, and usually I find myself wishing I could hear most of the pieces twice.  For awhile I thought I wasn’t paying careful enough attention, but I’m beginning to wonder if this just isn’t a factor of The Crossing and the works that they sing breaking new ground.  We are in a moment of musical transition.  The old forms are passing away, but new ways of writing are not yet settled.  If you pull out a Mass composed in the Renaissance era, there are certain technical and formal aspects of the writing that you can expect to see—a smaller ensemble for the Benedictus, repetition of Kyrie material in the Agnus Dei, etc.  The same kind of thing holds true for Operas, Oratorios and art songs.

But what The Crossing is doing doesn’t really seem to fit any of these molds.  Many of the texts are personally chosen by Donald Nally, who is a voracious reader.  And how should a composer tackle the poetry of Paul Celan or the selections of Seneca?  There is no canon for such a thing, and thanks be to God.  Many aficionados of music pride themselves on their understanding of harmony and of forms, but as I mentioned before, I’m more concerned about whether the musicians have something to say.  As long as this is true, music has a future, even with symphony orchestras.

But will we have the courage to cast off old habits that no longer work?

Quoniam, tu solus altissimus horn

I spent Saturday in Baltimore, which retains a kind of place of honor as my second home, since I went to college there and to this day have many friends there whom I do not see often enough.  Yesterday, though, the Wanderlust struck me, and I happened upon a good weekend, when many were gathering for a party, and I got to see people that I hadn’t seen in ten years, people that I thought I might never see again.

I went to a music conservatory, and so all my old classmates are musicians.  We can be a pedantic lot; in fact, this tendency was the theme of the first conversation I had after arriving in Charm City earlier yesterday afternoon.  But as we grow and mature, I like to think that musicians tend to take the world apart and put it back together again.  After all, artists, in general, demand that their Weltanschauung somehow make sense.  The conversation ten years on, therefore, becomes varied, interesting, and stimulating.

Later in the evening, I was lamenting with a friend the relative dearth of French Horn players in today’s high school bands.  Everyone wants to play the alto saxophone instead.  ”What’s the difference between a saxophone and a lawn mower?” one of my teachers once asked me.  ”You can tune a lawn mower.”  But a French Horn, on the contrary, has a wonderful sound, one that can tingle the spine—rather than the teeth—of the most cold-hearted.

Some people, in the face of situations such as the attack of the alto saxophones, simply give up and “surrender to the reality,” giving the French Horn parts to the saxophonists.  But not my friend.  He finds motivated people in his band and encourages them to consider this most august of Blechblaesinstrumenten.  And how does he do it?  By playing for them a recording from Bach’s D Major Mass (it’s actually the B Minor Mass, but I like to make a point of showing how silly theorists are by demonstrating that more of it is in D Major than b minor), specifically the Quoniam tu solus sanctus, which happens near the end of the Gloria:

For every instrument that’s worth a damn, there’s at least one piece of music that would make any sane man wish that he played that particular apparatus.  Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man makes one wish to be a percussionist; Mahler’s Fifth Symphony could make a trumpet player out of even the nicest Mensch; much of Brahms demonstrates the clarinet  and cello at their finest; a robust Anglican hymn sets properly the King of Instruments on its sapphire throne; and Gustav Holst’s Second Suite in F turns the euphonium into our friendliest neighbor.  I could go on and on down the list, with only a few exceptions, such as the tambourine, the harmonica, and, of course, the saxophone.

As it turns out, I can think of no greater piece with respect to the French Horn than this very Quoniam by the formidable J.S. Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived—and I don’t think that superlative is up for any meaningful debate.   My friend couldn’t have hit the nail more directly on the head than when he chose this piece.  He is calling people out of the darkness of Kenny G and into the daylight of fugues and ground bass.  And to hell with the Mozart Horn Concerto; this piece by Bach is where it’s at.

It is perhaps to risk appearing self-satisfied, not to mention slightly rhetorically disorganized, to point out something more fundamental about all this, something that transcends even the most somber subject of the saxophone.  To wit:  music, and all the arts, are essential to our dignity as human beings.  I dare say that these subjective things are even more important than the greatest treatises of Murray Rothbard or John Locke or even Frederic Bastiat.  Somehow, it seems to me, we could survive without economics and political philosophy; we would find a way to make the world work in a just and orderly manner in their absence.  But the arts give us our humanity; they remind us that we are not only legally entitled to but, more importantly, intrinsically worthy of the liberty that the philosophers have elucidated for us.  To be a musician, then, is a high calling indeed, and to teach young people the gift of music, and of the French Horn, is an indispensable necessity.

At the heart of it all is, of course, love.  Ubi caritas et amor, musica ibi est, to steal a Latin phrase.   “Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius,” said Mozart.  Here’s hoping that, through the great works composed for the French Horn, more people will come to love music, and to make it a part of their everyday lives.

And for God’s sake, whatever your children become—Redskins fans, Republicans, or even bloggers with too much time on their hands—don’t let them play the saxophone—-

unless they play like Charlie Parker.

Must-read books from 2009

Every year I keep track of what I read.  It’s a bit nerdy, for sure, but it helps to keep me motivated.  This year’s reading was so interesting that I decided to put off writing this post until the year was, for all intents and purposes, over.  Last year I managed to get the list out in time for Christmas shopping.  This time you’ll have to refer to this compilation for birthdays or something.

In the past twelve months, I’ve managed to start and finish thirty three books, which I actually consider to be modest.  I’d far rather be averaging one per week.  Of these, I’ve chosen ten to discuss, which is a rather high proportion; nevertheless there was no difficulty in coming up with books that were deserving of singular mention.  There is no rhyme or reason to the order of this list, and most of them should appeal to a broad range of people.

Henry Hazlitt:  Economics in One Lesson

How I found it: This book is constantly referenced in literature put out by the Mises Institute.

In a relatively short volume, using concise, easy-to-understand language, Hazlitt discusses some of the most basic concepts of economics.  The backdrop for this book is the wave of Keynesianism and Socialism that swept the West in the early-mid 20th century.  One of Hazlitt’s most beautiful insights concerns the unseen effects of policy decisions.  One example would be artificially high wage rates as demanded by labor unions.  On the surface this appears to benefit the workers, but the effects of this man-made price floor ripple through the economy, until they come to damage the interests even of the labor unions themselves.  This is an excellent beginner’s book on economics; no prior reading is necessary.

Oliver Sacks:  Musicophilia

How I found it: Stumbled upon it while Christmas shopping in 2008

Expectans, expectavi Domine…..This book makes me think of a piece of Gregorian chant, an offertory melody whose text is, “I have waited, waited on the Lord…..and he put a New Song into my mouth.”  Sacks fills this book with heaps of fascinating information and incredible stories.  If you can read it with a dry eye, you’re a better man than I am.  One account early in the book relates the story of a man who had never been involved in any way with music in his entire life; then one day he was struck by lightning, and began composing and playing the piano.  A surgeon friend of mine tells me that neuroscientists such as Oliver Sacks tend to have more of an appreciation for the spiritual, and one does indeed get this impression from Sacks, who seems to be steeped in just as much wonder and amazement at these things as his readers.  Moreover, musicians will find the reading of this book to be an experience of renewal, a re-awakening to the truth that music is indeed a gift to be cherished.

Naomi Klein:  The Shock Doctrine

How I found it: After a lively lunchtime discussion about politics with a musician friend, he escorted me to the bookstore and bought it for me.

“But this isn’t capitalism!”  I found myself saying this over and over again as I read through this incredibly revealing book. Klein passionately and thoroughly exposes the work of the merchants of death in the U.S. government, from CIA operatives and psychologists (who perfected torture techniques already in the 1950′s) to the infamous economist Milton Friedman.  Under the name of capitalism, the United States effected coups, killed people, and established fascistic economic systems (I’m using this term literally, not pejoratively) in faraway lands, like wolves in sheeps’ clothing.  The book is hardly sympathetic to the free market, but proponents of capitalism need to read this book and reckon with what some jackasses have done over the years while falsely claiming to be friends of the free market.  For me, it lead to a more precise definition of capitalism:  The system of voluntary exchange which results from the ethic of non-aggression and private property rights.  As one will find out from this book, the U.S. government respects neither the principle of non-aggression nor private property rights.

Ludwig von Mises:  Human Action

How I found it: You can’t get through two articles from an Austrian economist without seeing this book cited.

At nearly 900 pages, Human Action is Mises’ grand discourse.  The profound and most basic difference that Mises’ approach has with others is that it bases the study of economics on—well, human action.  It is the gentle and humble opposite of the arrogance of Rand’s Objectivism and Friedman’s mathematical equations.  Most refreshing is Mises’ allowance of subjectivity in the field of economics.  If I were to recommend one tiny section of this book over all others, though, it would be Mises’ criticism of the holistic view of society, a section that soundly rejects the sanctimony of many do-gooders, while at the same time showing that Austrian economics, rather than being atomistic, actually considers the good of the culture at large and posits that voluntary exchange on the free market is the way to achieve it.

J.L. Carr: A Month in the Country

How I found it: A friend lent it to me.

I am absolutely horrible about reading enough fiction, so I rely largely on friends to bring such things my way—actually, one friend in particular, who’s taste has proven to be quite sturdy.  One of the strengths of fiction is that general principles can be taught without tempting readers to quibble over minutiae the way certain kinds of non-fiction do.  Carr is British, and this is a short story about an artist that leaves London to spend a month in the countryside restoring the apse painting of a church.  While he’s there he sleeps in the bell tower and kibitzes with a lunatic archaeologist who’s charged with finding someone’s remains in the church yard.  A delightful little read that can be done in one afternoon on your front porch with a cold glass of iced tea.  (Perhaps save this one for Spring, then…)

Haruki Murakami:  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

How I found it: Browsing the book store looking for ways to throw money away

This title jumped right out at me, given that I’m a runner.  This is not a systematic “how-to” book or anything; it’s just a flow of conscious account of one man’s affair with the greatest sport in the world.  Murakami, a jazz bar owner-turned novelist, relates his journal entries to the reader.  This includes an account of his run along the original route that ends in Marathon, Greece, from which we get the name and distance for running events.  The title, he tells us, is based on someone else’s work which is called “What I Talk About When I Talk About Love,” and this is apposite.  The runner will find this book to be a source of new energy; non-runners will finish it perhaps a bit more curious about what it is that they’re missing.

John Robinson:  Dungeon, Fire and Sword

How I found it: Borrowed from a friend

This is the story of the Knights Templar during the Crusades.  In it you will find all manner of sanctimony, hypocrisy, and hiding behind religion for the sake of a political agenda.  The original mission of the Knights Templar was to guard the Temple Mount in Jerusalem when it was under Christian control.  Job creep set in, and, among other things, they came to guard the road to Compostella, a popular pilgrimage site, and to be some of the world’s first bankers.  They participated fervently in the mindless orgies that were the Crusades, proving that Islam is not the only religion to commit barbaric acts of war under the guise obedience to God and faith.  Ultimately, the success of the Templars was their undoing.  King Philip IV of France, who owed them enormous sums of money, manipulated an unholy alliance with the papacy to have the Knights tortured, tried, and killed on trumped up charges.  In a dramatic conclusion, Jacques de Molay, the last grand master of this order, was marched into the cathedral square in Paris to confess the “official version of events,” and in one last moment of courage, told the crowd the truth of what had been done to this order.  For this, he was rewarded with summary execution, but one cannot escape the impression that he was ultimately victorious over the lust for power which gripped the monarchs and the papacy at that time.

Murray N. Rothbard:  The Anatomy of the State

How I found it: On mises.org

At only fifty-plus pages, this book makes for good introductory reading to the anarcho-capitalist political philosophy.  In the short chapters contained in this volume, Rothbard contends with the superstitions that make people believe that the State is necessary.  The reading is not difficult; yet, the writer leaves out nothing of importance.  This would be a good companion alongside Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, with the added blessing that Rothbard does not suffer from Nock’s sometimes tiresome fatalism.

Louis Cheslock, ed.:  H.L. Mencken on Music

How I found it: Roaming around Bookhaven, a used book store in Philadelphia.

I have already reviewed this book here.

Richard M. Weaver:  The Ethics of Rhetoric

How I found it: Brought to my attention by Br. Stephen, of course

What would a year be without at least one Weaver book?  Like most of his work, I’m not sure how much of this volume I’ve absorbed; it may be worth a re-reading sooner rather than later.  Unlike the other volumes I’ve discussed here, I’ve actually had to pull this one off the shelf and thumb through it to jog my memory about what the writer discusses.  Among other things, some of which went over my head completely, Weaver discusses Edmund Burke’s use of the Argument from Circumstance and Lincoln’s use of the Argument from Definition.  The writer seems to have a surprising amount of admiration for Lincoln, given his dyed-in-the-wool Southern ways of thinking.  Perhaps the most interesting chapter in this book is Weaver’s exploration of grammar as it relates to rhetoric:  avoid the adjective, he says; it only begs the question.  Good advice which I have yet to follow.  Another chapter worth a great deal of study deals with the use of what Weaver calls ultimate terms:  ”God words” and “devil words.”  This discussion is still timely.  Think of how people try to shut one another up by hurling accusations of “intolerance” or “Godlessness.”  (Well, maybe I remembered some of this book, after all.)  If you haven’t read any Weaver yet, I’d start with Ideas Have Consequences, or maybe Language is Sermonic.  The Ethics of Rhetoric is a bit heady, and the reader will benefit from some built-up familiarity with the writer’s ways of thinking.

————

The great football coach Lou Holtz, the last one to win a national championship at Notre Dame, once said that the difference between where you are now and where you’ll be five years from now comes from the people you meet and the books you read.  In my experience, this is an understatement.  Books are among my favorite things; I would take them first, God forbid, in the event of a fire.  Many of the works I’ve discussed above were given, lent, or recommended to me by friends, and I would like to thank them.  They know who they are.  From personal experience I can say that few things feel as rewarding as having given a book to someone who not only gets it but also appreciates it.  The ideas in books can be so exciting, along with taking them apart and putting them back together again.  I’m not even sure that Belgian beer can compare to this.

“But I’m not a reader.  I just don’t get into books,” you might say.  To that I can only reply that you haven’t found the right books.  Reading is a tool, not an object in itself.  Find something that piques your curiosity, fires your imagination, or soothes the deepest longings of your soul.  I guarantee you that a book has been written about it.  Tolle, lese.

Happy New Year.

Re-thinking Thomas Day

I try to keep my work and my politics separated for the most part.  There are a number of reasons for this, most of which are obvious and not worth mentioning.  Every now and then, however, I break the rule.  This is one of those times.  Those who come to this blog for the political and more general commentary might well have no interest in this whatsoever, although I do take some potshots at certain kinds of political organizations which you might enjoy.  The topic of conversation, however, is church music, which I try to spruce up with what a friend of mine calls an “incisive” writing style.  That’s putting it nicely, I think.

In any case, I just finished re-reading Thomas Day’s famous book Why Catholics Can’t Sing, and I have documented a metanoia which I underwent here.

Two songs that I hate to love

Often, the lyrics to a given piece of music are utterly abhorrent to me while the music itself is delicious.  Such is the case with a couple of English nationalist hymns.

The first is God Save the Queen:

The second is I Vow to Thee, My Country:

I thought these would be some appropriate pieces to share, given the present Nationalist holiday taking place in America.  Every year at this time, I call up some of my monarchist friends and sing God Save the Queen.  It probably gives them false hope that I might be finding the Hapsburgian light, but really I’m just exorcising my frustration with the Americanists, who, though they celebrate Independence Day, have turned this country into such a mess that George III looks like a benevolent dictator.

Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra

Sometime in the early 1940′s, Bela Bartok emigrated to the United States.  He was broke, and, what is worse, sick.  Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, commissioned him to write  a piece, which he composed while lying sick.  The result was his concerto for orchestra, a magnificent piece human ingenuity.  In it is all the angst and hope that one would think a suffering man might have.  Sometimes the worst circumstances in life produce the most amazing and surprising things.  That’s comforting when times are tough.  When times are good, it’s a frightening thought.

Here’s the first movement:

H.L. Mencken on Music

H.L. Mencken on Music

Louis Cheslock, ed.

New York:  Schirmer

A few days ago, as a belated birthday treat to myself and in celebration of the end of a long work cycle, I visited Bookhaven, Philadelphia’s finest vault of used books.  This is one of those places in which there is always something to be found, even if it isn’t what was originally sought.  On this particular day I had it in my mind to see if they had a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, one of three hymnals, all of which are Anglican, which are worth having.  No dice there, but in one last desperate attempt to find what I sought, I visited the music section.  There was Maynard Solomon’s biography of Mozart, the Grove Dictionary, H.L. Mencken on Music, something about Wagner…..

Hold on a minute.  H.L. Mencken on Music?  Indeed, and as it turns out it was edited by Louis Cheslock, professor of theory at my alma mater, the Peabody in Baltimore.  This was a no-brainer, and it was quickly added to the pile of books I had already amassed that afternoon, books that I did not seek but which nevertheless sought me.  

Mencken’s writing is incisive and vivacious, graced with a wit that, while sardonic, never descends into bitterness.  He could, at the same time, be fiercely logical, particularly when exploding the various quackeries put forth by congressmen, the Temperance Union, or the Kiwanis Club.   All things considered, he seemed to me to be the last person that would be so profoundly absorbed in music.  I was wrong, and in my error I found great delight, for Mencken approaches the subject of music with such deep devotion that many of us paid minstrels, who face the same job hazards of frustration and burnout that everyone else does, ought to be put to shame for approaching our art sometimes in routine rather than inspired fashion.  At moments, Mencken wrote with such enthusiasm that he had me running for my iPod, and sometimes even my old-fashioned CD rack, to find something that I hadn’t listened to perhaps in years.  

To be sure, there is some outdated information in this collection of essays, but that is to be expected from a book that was last edited in 1960.  All the same, Mencken speaks with an informed authority on a wide-range of music that makes Albert Schweitzer look like the mountebank that he was.  From chant and Palestrina to Bach to Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven to Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms, to Igor Stavinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and jazz (all three of which he detested), Mencken covers all the most important composers of the Western canon that existed at the time he was writing, and he does it with erudition and love.

Mencken himself was a musician of amateur persuasion.  He insisted that he played badly, but he also implied at times that he wrote badly.  If this is any means by which to measure the situation, he was probably adequate, to say the least.  He was a member of the now famous “Saturday Night Club,” a group of music enthusiasts which met weekly in Baltimore.  Editor Cheslock was a member as well and does a good job of providing the reader with background information on this band of Renaissance men who clung to a tradition which modern distraction has largely obliterated.

It is tempting to try to say too much about this book.  Maybe it’s best, then to stick to a couple of things, the first of which might come as a surprise, given the seeming iconoclastic tendencies of the writer.  Today, for instance, people in the main laugh at the ancient Greek notions that music can be dangerous, that its mystical tones can woo us to do good or ill, or just downright tawdry things.  Mencken takes up the Hellenic cause, saying that the music a man creates is revelatory of character.  ”When a trashy man writes, it is trashy music,” he says.  In the same vein, while extolling the artistic genius of Franz Schubert, Mencken says that his operas all came to nothing, and that this is because a successful opera composer is half musician and half clown.  Schubert, being a man of good taste, was incapable of such nonsense.

More interesting gems are contained in Mencken’s writing about church music.  ”New Wedding March Needed,” trumpets a headline to one of these essays, written years before it was popular for pastors to ban the now infamous Wagner and Mendelssohn pieces.  The author goes on to suggest that these works remain entrenched because of the laziness of organists, for whom each wedding is about as interesting as a new chin to a busy barber.  On the very next page one finds “Enter the Church Organist,” a far from inaccurate spoof on a typical character in this profession.  (Cheslock explains that, as part of Mencken’s job for the local paper, he was often sent to third rate organ recitals as a reviewer, for which Mencken has my deep sympathies.)  Perhaps the most surprising essay in the whole collection is the one on Catholic Church music, in which Mencken lauds the efforts of Pope Pius X to resurrect chant and polyphony and shelve the operatic caterwauling that had been fashionable at that time. It’s not the kind of story one would expect to come from an agnostic, but this could perhaps be the result of the writer’s occasional friendly gatherings with clergymen, including the local archbishop.

Buy this book and read it to find out even more, to discover what Mencken had to say about private music lessons, “Music and Sin” (which is the chapter on jazz), singers (especially tenors), the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, and much more.  Amateurs, and even people who yet know nothing about classical music, can enjoy and benefit from this book, and musicians can find great inspiration in the joie de vivre which gallops from every page.  If you can read parts of these essays with a dry eye, you’re a better man than I.  It is quite clear that to this man of words, one of the most prolific and colorful writers in the American language tradition, music is the ultimate language, a kind of logos.  He writes:

“My lack of sound musical instruction was really the great depravation of my life. When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English, and continue to this day to pour out more and more. But all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only like a child.”

Mars, the Bringer of War

I was reading yet another story about the shaky relationship between the U.S. and North Korea, when Gustav Holst’s Mars started on my iPod.  How appropriate!  Check it out.