Marathon

I've always thought of artistic endeavors as more of a marathon than a sprint, which might be one reason you won't see any piano playing at the Olympics. It isn't that people haven't figured out how to make piano playing a competitive sport; they've just never been able to draw the ratings necessary for it. But imagine if they did put it on television.

For one thing, you would have to have a pair of announcers telling us all everything the pianist did that wasn't exactly up to par. You can't trust people to hear wrong notes themselves--I've made a career out of making mistakes that people are either too polite to point out or are too subtle for anyone without intimate knowledge of the score to hear in the first place. And when improvising, one can always take a missed note and make it sound intentional. It all depends on what you do in the moments immediately following.

And yet, in ice skating, it is completely obvious to anyone when someone falls on his or her can in the middle of a routine and yet you still have intermediaries crying out to let us know that it was a bad thing. Also, when a what was advertised as a triple axle turns out to be merely a double ("Bob, he's only playing that scale passage with one hand! That's an automatic deduction right there!") or when the landing was a bit wobbly ("that F# sounded more like mezzo forte than mezzo piano. We'll have to see what the judges think about that!"). There is no way NBC would let somebody get all the way through the Goldberg Variations without incessant commentary. People expect it.

(Actually, ABC tried presenting an entire football game on a Monday night in the 70s without announcers and they decided afterward people wanted them.)

But it's the pace of the arts that is the biggest obstacle, or perhaps the average attention span. This has apparently been compounded recently by the ubiquitous 90 second clips that festoon the online experience--it is rather difficult these days to actually watch a more lengthy excerpt. But, hey, the people have spoken (maybe).

But even on broadcast television you have to get through a sea of advertising. That's ok. For the longer events, say the marathon, they line up, the gun goes off, you see them run for thirty seconds, they go to commercial. They cover 3 other events. They go to commercial four times. They come back...people are still running! how exciting.

If the event is shorter, like a 3 minute skating program, they just stick commercials in between each of the competitors. I am old (and cranky) enough to remember when they would actually let you watch three or four people compete and THEN cut away to commercials. But, like all economic enterprises, people wanted to see if they could make just a little bit more money putting a few more ads in there which caused prices to come down which means they have to put more ads in there, and so forth.

I could imagine the day when piano made it to the Olympics (summer or winter, I wonder? I guess if it was a winter event you'd have to place it on ice.) On comes the Russian. He begins to play Chopin's "Minute" Waltz. Five measures of it. fade to a commercial for a car. We come back. Now he's playing part of the second section. We get another eight bars. Time for another commercial. Return for the big finish. And always the announcer telling us what we could have already figured out for ourselves, mostly. Heck, once in a while they say something I hadn't thought of, not being a retired competitor, and I learn something. Then he grins at the judges, takes a big bow, and walks off. We wait for the scores. Tears, or triumph. He moves into second place, for now. He gets flowers, and a hug from his coach. And his mommy. He waves at the camera. Such a cutie.

He is, of course, all of five years old.

The thing with the rodent predicting the weather and how it has to do with baby Jesus

My wife got tired of my constantly interrupting her with new revelations about what I was learning over the interwebs on Sunday so I figured I'd bother you with them instead.

We have a thing here in America called Groundhog Day. I imagine I should explain that because you never know where in the world someone might be reading your blog and while it is common knowledge in this country it might be completely off the radar somewhere else. Maybe the Swiss, for example, have better things to do.

But here in North America a custom has developed, dating back to 1887, wherein a particular form of rodentia by the name of Puxatawny Phil, who happens to reside in Puxatawny, Pennsylvania, USA, is released from his gilded cage once a year on February 2nd at 7:27 or so in the morning, and, if he sees his shadow we are in for six more weeks of winter, and if he does not, we will have an early spring.

I realize the idea of a groundhog predicting the weather must seem so self evident that even folks in Saudi Arabia are thinking I'm being very patronizing for feeling the need to explain that, but thus it is.

Also, I'm afraid sarcasm may not be as universal as I'd like it to be, either, so I am now compounding my error.

Anyhow, folks in the USA are quite taken with the idea. In addition to Mr. Phil, there is also quite a bit of other geographical groundhoggery with colorful names, though the people of Pennsylvania believe them to be cheap knock-offs and swear by Phil and Phil alone.

I was in church rehearsing with the band when I first got the news of Phil's shadow-seeing on my phone and like many Americans I have spent the week since being sore at Phil for bearing such tidings and not forecasting an early spring. We could really use one around here, particularly with the unusually severe winter we are experiencing in central Illinois. If Phil had gone the other way, we would not have gotten those 6 inches of snow this week, and this morning's low would not have been minus 4 for something like the 18th day this winter.

I realize that makes about as much sense as being angry at the Seattle Seahawks for beating the Denver Broncos in the Superbowl recently. For one thing, that is exactly what they are supposed to try to do, and for another, the highly talented group of football players who play on a team located in your city may win or lose, but what does that really have to do with you and your accomplishments, or your worth as a human being? They aren't related to you, and you aren't coaching the team.

But football fandom is popular anyhow, and fans do take losses personally, and besides, with something like Phil you get an outlet for your general frustration with winter for a few days and people won't think you are too crazy for cursing a groundhog so long as he a) ate your flowers or b) is a nationally recognized custom and symbol of whatever insanity is considered just a lot of harmless fun by enough of the population.

But just so I could experience a little more of that fun, and because I was sure it had to be on Wikipedia, I thought I'd check a list of Phil's predictions since the dawn of time (1887) and see how often he had been right and so forth.  So I went online and did some digging (sorry).*

There I learned that some of his predictions were never written down and had been lost for all time (!) but that he also managed to be correct only about 40% of the time. Which was strange, because he usually predicts more winter, which is what I assumed would be the safe thing to predict in Pennsylvania in early February. Apparently people there experience early spring more often than I would have thought. It made me wonder what constitutes an "early spring"--does it have to last for more than a day of anomalous warm weather? Does it count if it occurs 5 and a half weeks into the 6 weeks period of extra winter? Did whoever compile that list have it in for Phil?

While I was doing my research I stumbled across a thing called "Candlemas." It always occurs on the 2nd of February, which is 40 days after Christmas. If I were Catholic I would probably know what it was, but as a less liturgically sensitive Protestant, I hadn't heard of it. It marks the presentation of the baby Jesus in the temple, as was the custom with infants (is this where he was circumcised?) and the prophecies of Simeon and Anna as related in Luke 2.  Evidently, there sprang up a proverb, centuries later, that the weather of Candlemas was a predictor of the length of winter. For instance, this Scottish version: "If Candlemas is bright and clear, there'll be two winters in the year." Candlemas got its name because the priests would bless candles and pass them out to the people. This must have made things confusing since the artificial light source would have led to a certain amount of extraneous shadow seeing.

There were also a number of stories related to the reawakening of animals out of their hibernatory habitats, and these also play a part in the eventual coming of Phil the Magnificent.

Folks in Pennsylvania have naturally updated the custom with a lot of modern pageantry for the 21st century mind, and also to keep the groundhog punctual and reliable. You couldn't have him running off and just being a groundhog, or deciding he prefers February 3rd some year when you've got The Media waiting. So what they do is keep him in a cage, and every year the president of the "inner circle" gets him out at the appointed time, holds him aloft, and listens to Phil jibber in "groundhogeese" which only the current president of the "inner circle" can understand. Said president then translates it to the crowd. I am not sure if this is before or after they slip him a drink that lengthens his life for another 7 years so he can go on being the same groundhog he was since 1887, shaming the farmer's almanac with his beasty intuition.

Anyway, then they sing a few hymns and go home. Wait, that might be Candlemas.

So there you have it--a concise explanation of the relationship between baby Jesus and Groundhog Day. At the time of this writing, I am still not sure how either of them is related to Kevin Bacon.
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*no I'm not.

A little Musical Motivation

Here's a video a friend shared with me this week. Apparently the arts are good for something....

watch it here

Making Connections

One of the difficulties I've always found with liturgy is that it tends to be very local. One short musical response followed by a prayer or a reading, then another short musical response. In the best of situations those responses have something to do with one another, the elements coalesce, the service itself seems to be about something, to have a particular mood, message, occasion, reason for being, but at other times, the service wanders, shifts gears constantly, not sure whether to celebrate or beat its breast, proclaim, meditate, confess, or try to do them all in no particular order.

This is because, in the long running battle of form with function, form has always dominated the church service. All the same elements in the same order, week after week, because that's the way we are supposed to do it, or we like it that way, or it is just easier not to have to make new decisions, or we think God likes it that way, or something.

There are ways, though, myriad ways, to draw connections between the elements, between themes and ideas and positions. Ways to play the opening hymn or the prayer response differently from week to week so that it seems meant not only for the long procession of worship occasions past present and future but on this one occasion particularly intended for this one. 

The last couple of weeks I've been doing that with the transition to the doxology. Between the offertory and the closing hymn in our service sits the celebratory doxology. It is always loud, always majestic, and sometimes of a completely different character than the offertory that immediately precedes it. I submit for your ears the offertory I played on Baptism of the Lord Sunday this year. It's five and a half minutes--if you are in a hurry you can just listen to enough of it to get the idea.

[listen]

Right. Now, as soon as that ends, it is time for the doxology, which, at our 10:30 service, sounds like this:

[listen]

(Better, if I don't miss that pedal note at the beginning!)

If you have difficulty imagining how those two things fit together, that makes two of us. So here is what I did about it. After the offertory concluded, I played this (or something like it) as an introduction to the doxology:

[listen]

That last phrase it designed to get people to stand up, and it works.

The following week we had a classical guitar solo for the offertory. The musical selection was the lute suite in E major. Since our soloist needed a little time to move his equipment back, I made a longer introduction to cover the sound and give him the necessary time. Also, I hoped, to preserve the character of what we'd just heard and move it into the doxology. What I actually played was improvised at the service, and it was more inspired than what I dashed off for the microphone late last night. But it was something like this:

[listen]

That also meant I took the doxology up a half step. I hope the sopranos in the choir didn't mind. I didn't ask!

The net effect of this is, I hope, to help the service to flow better from one moment to the next, and also to say that in the long parade of weekly services, THIS day matters enough to get the elements to cooperate with one another and make one effective statement out of, to build on the enthusiasm, or the introspection, of a particular moment in time, and not to simply break into it with our regularly scheduled bits of stuff we have to do every week whether it derails the effect or not. 

This is something over which I could write many a blog (and perhaps will one day). It is not intended to subvert the liturgy but to enhance it. And of course it requires imagination and improvisational skills, and much practice in making quick decisions, taking risks (often I have not planned this out ahead of time) and trusting that somehow things will go well. Better than well, one hopes. But then, there is always next week. In a curious way, for a learning musician, church is an excellent laboratory in this respect. On the other hand, every experiment matters. Which is why you live and learn, and yet why I so often will not leave well enough alone.

Because it isn't "well enough."

Blogger, interrupted

There have been those times when after merely typing the title of a blog entry I am called away by some unexpected obligation. Does this happen to you? You have just settled in to make use of some stolen bit of time to go on a creative jag when some other member of the animal kingdom, on two legs or four (such as the one currently out to steal the milk from my bowl of breakfast cereal) makes a demand on your time which may only take a few minutes, a few hours, or perhaps change the character of the entire day. This poses a difficulty for creative artists trying to concentrate on something they are trying to produce, compose, write, bring forth, et cetera.

There are known obligations aplenty as it is, and it is often hard to negotiate productivity around these. Sure, I'll think crossly, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies, but did he have to mow his lawn?

The answer: no. Dmitri Shostakovich lived in a high-rise apartment and never had to work in the yard. He lived in a building with all the other Soviet artists, surrounded by the noise of instruments and in fear of being disappeared  by the Stalin administration for saying or doing something unpleasant to said comrade. But he had no yard work to worry about. Which also means no snow shoveling in the driveway in winter.

Domestic duties can, of course, suck up plenty of time, which is why many of our most celebrated composers not only did not own houses, they were also unmarried and had no children. Brahms, for example, or Beethoven. Beethoven, however, had a habit of moving frequently, which must have been a major time suck. He wrote 32 piano sonatas and moved some 67 times. Some of the can be accounted for by the fact that everybody moved out of the city in the summer to avoid the heat, and back again in the fall, usually to a new apartment. Of course, moving in those days wouldn't have been quite as complicated an affair, with less furniture for a bachelor and a lighter piano that did not take three linebackers to get up the stairs, though by the end of his life the piano was already starting to become the unwieldy monster it is today.

Bach, as you know, had 20 children, but he did not have to drive a single one of them to soccer practice. He also lived in an apartment and had no yard work. And his children actually served to copy out parts for him. If he had had Finale, he could have done it himself, which would have freed up his children to fight over who got the X-box and could have kept poor Johann Sebastian continually refereeing their squabbles.

Mozart only had one child, no yard, and could compose while playing Billards, according to the movie, though he seems to have been his own worst enemy when it came to physical fitness.

Anyhow, creative work tends to take long periods of concentration, and tends to suffer if it has to proceed in occasional snicks and snacks. Not to mention that that method can get a bit irritating.

Now what was it I was going to write about?

No reason it couldn't be done on skis, I suppose

With the Winter Olympics coming up next week, I've been making bizarre comparisons between the world of sports and the world of the arts. Last week it was all about bigger, faster, stronger...well, mostly faster and louder. This week it's time to focus on those fascinating sports you used to never see broadcast anyplace except once every four years at the Olympics, though now you can tune and catch them all in perfect ubiquity, 24 hours a day, if you've got ESPN 7.

In the winter Olympics, our fascinated attention is drawn to exotic outliers like Curling and the Biathlon. The way the biathlon works is that two great sports that have nothing at all to do with each other are mashed together, such as skiing and shooting. First you have to run on skis really hard and fast, then you have to stop and hit five targets. It's something that was first invented by college students very early one morning surrounded by empty pizza boxes and formerly alcoholic beverages.

A similar sport with a musical twist was invented by yours truly one spring when training for a 5k. Having made the pleasant discovery that the distance from my home to the church where I work and back was exactly the same distance as a 5k, I devised a sport where I ran to the church, practiced for a couple of hours, and ran back. In those days that was about all I could handle. But I think it would be a great way for organists to compete in the Olympics.

The way I envision such a sport working is that the competitors will run a mile or so to their respective instruments, and discover, upon getting there, that a particular Bach chorale prelude has been placed on the music rack. These Chorale Preludes will have various difficulty ratings, of course, and a hefty computer formula will have to be invented to reward points based on technical perfection at a given difficulty rating. There will be no points for musicality, historical awareness, or style, naturally, though points will be deducted for missing notes and going over the allotted amount of time, which will reward persons who can play faster and roboticly but have no imagination. Otherwise we would have to bring in judges and there would be scandals, which would draw more attention to the sport than we want if we want it to comfortably remain on ESPN 7.

Having to play one of the more contrapuntally complex and faster chorales would be a challenge if all the blood were flowing to your legs which naturally rewards sheer consistency and practice. And of course having technical perfection being so important not only mirrors contemporary societal values in art, it would give the announcers a chance to grimace and shout brilliant things like "oh no! He missed the E-flat! That's an automatic tenth of a point deduction."

The music finished, the competitors would get up and run to the next station, where a piano would be waiting for them and they would launch into a Beethoven sonata. Sound like something you'd watch? You and at least four other people in the country? I have to know before I pitch it to the IOC.

Getting a good return in the long run

Performing musicians: Today I'm going to talk to you like I'm your financial advisor.

You need to diversify your portfolio.

It's a complex, competitive world out there, and if you want to be able to survive as a musician--I'm speaking here to people who want to do music for something other than a private hobby--you have to be open in the first place to the fact that you will probably end up doing some things that have nothing to do with what you thought you'd be doing, even in the field of music.

In the second place, however, it is almost certain that even in your specific vision of what you've got in mind you will find that the logistics, deadlines, and uncertainties of day to day operations make it necessary to really on every skill you've got in your arsenal. Unless you've just got the one, then--look out.

It's become sort of a joke around here lately that I like to play the piano with one hand while taking pictures with the other, but I've actually been cultivating my skills at multitasking a lot these past few years. When you perform with ensembles, particularly amateur ensembles, you generally need to be able to help them while helping yourself at the same time. And on Sunday morning during a church service you never know what will happen and how you will need to deal with it. I've been learning to perform distracted--and to consider that what I'm hearing and how to deal with it is an important part of music making, and not something I need to screen out.

On the other hand, I've also been honing my concentrating skills, which is the complete opposite. I used to tell my students that even if the Blue Angels flew overheard during their recital they had to ignore it and keep going. I once kept on playing through a fire drill, so I think I've got the cred. I figured if things were really on fire they'd come back for me anyway.

Anyhow, the important thing is I'm still here.

The other important thing is that, in a given week, I do plenty of sight reading, plenty of playing by ear, plenty of making things up on the spot, composing, and especially problem solving to figure out how I'm going to get everything done and done well. This week I did all my recording on Monday because I knew it was going to be 4 below zero the rest of the week and I like to record with the heat off temporarily so there is less hum on the recordings, and at those temperatures you can't maintain any semblance of heat for more than a couple of minutes. So I've spent the rest of the week composing three pieces a few weeks ahead of their deadlines, and jamming in rehearsals as needed. Basically you have to size everything up, figure out when your opportunities present themselves, and do what you can do when you can do it. I've gotten better at that over the years.

It's a pretty diversified life, and I like the challenge. Which is another skill you'll need. Challenge-loving. Along with discipline and hard work, it means you'll always get better at what you do, because what you are doing is always dealing with challenges. You can only improve what you practice, and the more you see something as an opportunity to practice it, (instead of complaining about it) the faster you'll improve.