(Why I Do It)

Barbara Thornton, from "Poetics as Technique," in A Performer's Guide to Medieval Music:

Barbara Thornton (1950-1998)

“I want to be a performer, not an authority—these are two separate identities in the medieval world. The authority (auctoritas) writes from the highest viewpoint with the aim of establishing steadfast truths and principles. Though I have mentioned often that we look to practical treatises for practical guidelines, the musical treatises of the period provide the underlying philosophical ground for everything we do, and we move entirely within that context, acknowledging it freely. This is the function of auctoritas: to remain in contact with the “higher spheres,” as exemplified by Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, etc. As a performer, I wish to embody the philosophies of the art naturally, almost unconsciously; other than that, I am a collection of techniques, observations, and experiences. In a teaching capacity I think of myself as a transmitter: I pass on the material in human, not written form. I supposedly thereby stimulate the imagination (mine included). With what?  With the poet’s images and the musician’s music; only to the extent that my imaginings help the original material are my personal images of any importance. Principally, the goal is to reach and “empower” the independent imagination of the other person. Once it is operative, the hunt for the poet’s path and the life of his images is shared equally [. . .] I cannot take away a student’s own hunt for meaning in the material, nor can I create it. Nor should I put myself in a position, by playing auctoritas, of depleting my own imaginal energies. Look to the poems themselves, and learn to feel, feel, feel through modes—you will find the elated, disappointed, consummated, frustrated traces of other people looking for “poetic truth.”  You will find the best possible company for your quest. There are the tracks and traces to follow. I try to teach how to see the tracks, how to hunt with them.”

The Sound of One Hand Plucking

Dear Captains Obvious: What? The “medieval music” that I play “isn’t actually medieval?” [Forehead slap] Are you kidding me? 

I am doing a lot of reading for this tome I’m trying to write on improvisation (and what I am calling “fluid composition”) in the performance of medieval music, and I keep running into these admonitions regarding the impossibility of doing medieval music “the way it was.” Now, I can’t speak for other performers of medieval music, but is this actually a revelation for anyone? Does anyone think for a moment that every aspect of their performances of medieval music is a picture-perfect re-enactment of “the way it was?”

In his book The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, whose scholarship I very much respect, says “The modern performance of medieval music absolutely requires that one believe both incompatible things together: we try to do it the way it was, and we know we cannot, and we argue for both.” I’m not so sure that trying to do it ‘the way it was’ and ‘knowing that I cannot’ are actually incompatible. To me, those two facts taken together are more like a Zen koan, the proverbial “sound of one hand clapping.” The very fact that we medieval music nerds do spend a lot of time trying to “find out what might be recoverable” means that we acknowledge that some is not recoverable. This is not the same as “arguing for both.” We are not arguing for anything. (Well, not all of us.) We are assembling musical material from a particular time period, and where there is not enough there to make a complete performance that we as performers can do with conviction, we invent the rest (which in the end is exactly Leech-Wilkinson’s point.) Even the hard-cores of the “everything was a cappella” school have to invent the text underlay of the untexted parts of the 15th century chansons. We have to make decisions – it’s that, or leave a thousand years worth of western music history mouldering in a drawer. Would we give up having ever heard “Viderunt” because people were quibbling about who/what produced the long sustained tones in the tenor?

Some of us then take it even a step further, and ask ourselves if there is anything to be learned about the ways in which music was “invented,” learned, memorized, and transmitted from one person to the other in the medieval era, in the event that might inform our own process. This is why some of us undertake insane projects such as writing a primer intended to help modern players attempt to use improvisation and “fluid” composition in order to turn “what might be recoverable” in medieval music into that elusive thing called “a performance.”

As for “the way it was,” is there really such a thing? Why do we try to come up with these incontrovertible rules about the way in which a certain kind of music was “always” performed? What if the third singer was sick that day, but Pierre had his vielle with him? What if they did it one way in Munich and another way in Cologne? What if this town was well-known for its great singers, and this other town noted for its accomplished instrumentalists? And speaking of instruments, what were they all used for? Firewood?

Sometimes we read about Civil War re-enactors who go outside on a frigid night in their uniforms and sleep in a snowdrift to try and see what it was like, or go through the motion of a particular military maneuver. Sure, they try to get the details right—the fabric of the clothing, the ammo in the historical firearms, the beans in the pot, the whole thing.

But let’s face it--these guys know they can get up, brush themselves off, and go home if the Grim Reaper threatens to show up before 11pm. They know (usually) they’re not actually going to shoot each other. They probably know that their 45 years of 20th century nutrition and medical care has resulted in a physical body that may be radically different than the one they might have had if they had been born in 1820. Does that mean there is nothing “historical” at all in what they’re doing? Are they not collecting as much data as they can in order to try and understand something from the past that interests them, fascinates them, perhaps tells them something new about their own, present world? And in the end, are we “strange persons” who insist on trying to play “medieval” music not doing something rather similar--collecting as much data as we can in order to try and understand a music from the past that interests us, fascinates us, and perhaps has much to tell us about both the music of the past and the music that we make in this moment of our own, present world?

So people, please! Stop bickering over whether the lower two lines in a fifteenth-century chanson were sung or played. Educate yourselves, ponder the arguments for both, make a damned decision, and then get on with creating a performance that someone in 2011 might actually want to listen to.

Haiku

For two dear friends: the last haiku by the Japanese poet Seira (d.1791)




Funabata ya                       Boarding the boat
kutsu nugisuteru                 I slip off my shoes:
mizu no tsuki                       moon in the water.

Where is this?

Hey folks, notice that I've completely changed the way the blog looks. I was interested to see that this particular image is one of the options on the template I chose. It might be the Cliffs of Moher pre-Visitor's Center. Anyone want to help identify?

From "Great Eastern Sun"

Long time no blog – trying to get it going again.

Here is a (very) long passage from the book Great Eastern Sun by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987), one of the major players in the wave of Tibetan and Zen teachers who brought Buddhism to the west in the latter part of the 20th century. It is an incredibly profound commentary about the basic sadness of living in a messed-up world.

Here it is. Suggestion: Read it aloud to yourself.

“ . . .because there is still so much misery, chaos, and degradedness taking place in the world, a certain sadness begins to occur to you. That sadness could be called feeling your heart, actually experiencing your heart fully and thoroughly. Sadness is accompanied by a feeling of aloneness. You wish you could rush to somebody and babble out everything, empty your heart out and share it completely, so that you don’t have to feel sad. There’s that temptation, but it is not possible. It’s like unfulfilled love. When you try to tell somebody how much you love him or her, the other person can’t understand why you’re making such a dramatic fuss. This is the same kind of thing. The feeling of aloneness is an organic development. It is a natural situation. One doesn’t actually have to develop aloneness. Rather, it is a question of actualizing and realizing aloneness. When that happens, communicating with others becomes very simple.

“Sadness is also connected with the absence of cowardice. When you feel brave, free from fear, you also feel sad. That sadness is not the sadness of feeling low and depressed, but it is tear-jerking sadness that is always with you. One you have experienced the bravery that arises from basic goodness, you will also experience sadness and aloneness. In spite of joining festivities with your relatives, in spite of celebrating the holidays, attending Christmas parties or New Year’s parties--whatever you do to try to forget that sadness—sadness will always be there. The more you try to enjoy yourself and the more you do enjoy, nonetheless, there is still the constant sadness of being alone.

“That sadness also brings tenderness toward oneself. It is quite distinct from depression or the feeling that you want to commit suicide. When people are depressed and lonely—rather than alone—they sometimes what to commit suicide to get rid of their bodies and the environment of depression. With the Shambhala type of sadness, you want to live and help others. Tremendous humor is also present. Nonetheless, there is the sadness of being oneself.

“It is as if you were taking a walk in the forest by yourself in the twilight. You hear the birds. You see a glimpse of light coming from the sky: you might see a crescent moon or clusters of stars. The freshness of the greenery with occasional wildflowers is trying to cheer you up. In the distance, dogs are barking. In the distance, a child is crying. Shepherds are calling for their sheep. More likely, in America, in the distance, you hear the roar of the highway, where trucks and cars are making their journeys. Alone in this woodland, you can still hear them and feel them.

“You feel a little bit of freshness as the wind begins to blow on your cheeks. You smell the freshness of the woods. You might be startled by an occasional rabbit jumping out of the brush or an occasional bird, startled as you walk by its nest. Pheasants cross your pathway. As twilight goes on, you feel tenderness and sadness for your husband, your wife, your children, your grandparents. You remembers the classroom where you studied, learning to spell words when you first went to school. You remember learning to spell your name, learning how to write the letters j and o, m and a.

“The sadness of being oneself is like taking a walk in the forest, the borderland where things are not completely out of the way. There’s still a feeling that this particular woodland is surrounded by other living beings, human beings as well as other beings. You listen to the sound of your own footsteps, right, left, right, left. Occasionally you step on a dry twig, which cracks. Maybe there are occasional sounds of flies buzzing. Such sadness and aloneness are painful, but at the same time, they are beautiful and real. Out of that comes longing to help others. Being willing to work with others arises spontaneously. Because you care for yourself, therefore, equally you care for others. That seems to take a certain edge off the sadness. At the same time, sadness still hovers around you.

“You being to see yourself: you realize that you are unique, and you can see how you sometimes make a caricature of yourself. The sadness goes on, constantly. Yet you begin to realize there is something good and constructive about being you as yourself. This experience brings devotion, faith in the great warriors who have made the same journey. It could be devotion toward King Arthur’s knights, or any great warriors whose legend inspires you. When caring for others takes place, it brings devotion and dedication to this world in which you grew up. At the same time, caring for others brings renunciation. You are inspired to renounce anything that is without heart: any perversion, selfishness, egotism, and arrogance.

“Then, a fundamental wholesomeness arises in oneself, which we call the Great Eastern Sun. It is Great because it is vast and inconceivable. One cannot measure how vast the universe is stitch by stitch. Because of that vastness, there is Great East: vast possibilities, vast vision, vast aloneness, vast loneliness, vast sadness. One is always in the East, the dawn of wakefulness. One never falls asleep, never gets tired of life or breathing in and out, as long as we live. One never gets tired of opening one’s eyes. One never gets tired of this aloneness, the stirring of this woodland.”


-- Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939-1987), from Great Eastern Sun (Shambala, 1999), 149-151

Finger Pointing at the Moon

9:26 pm: I begin a blog post, writing this sentence:

“What if you decide that what you really want is to retire to New England, garden, meditate, and be left alone to play your musical instruments (at last), but you’re stuck in hot, insane Texas with 3 months of work to accomplish in three weeks, and retirement is at least 15 years away?”

9:28 pm: I pause to re-read it, and one of my students texts me: “Have you seen this moon?”

9:29 pm: I walk out my front door; big fat yellow moon, the kind you only see either in vast flat places, or over the ocean.

Thank you, Grasshopper.

Visualize Recovery

Fellow Humans:

I am a strong believer in the power of collective thought and collective energy.

The spill in the Gulf is an eco-disaster the likes of which we have never faced. It is easy to feel overwhelming despair when seeing the horrific photos of birds and animals and the relentless TV coverage showing the constant gushing of the well, and reading about the livelihoods ruined, the men who died and were injured in the blast, the irresponsibility of the corporate giants whose negligence caused this. For the average person who has little or no control over this, it is easy to feel almost panic-stricken. Panic, fear and despair are natural reactions to this situation, but those emotions are also the media’s stock in trade. Bombarded by the sight of these oily creatures and that hideous, constant Fox and CNN image of the oil jetting into the ocean magnifies the collective sense of powerlessness.

I am going to suggest an exercise in collective consciousness. We cannot plug the hole with our thoughts, of course, but I strongly believe that positive energy can affect healing processes and the efficacy of our actions and ideas. I do not mean that we should ignore what is happening – we cannot ignore it, and it demands our intense attention. We do not have individual control over the event, but we do have control over the type of attention we give to it.

I truly believe that a mass collective visualization of solution and recovery can affect the process, just as a mass collective panic and mental tailspin can affect the process negatively. So this is what I propose. Every day until this hole is plugged, at Noon ET, wherever you are, take three minutes of your lunch break to create a large mass of collective positive energy to counteract the media fear and panic. Sit quietly and visualize the cessation of the gushing mass of oil. It doesn’t matter that we haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Visualize that it stops. Send positive energy to those engineers who are coming up with solutions, to the people who are saving as many creatures as they can, to the people who are cleaning up the coast. Send healing energy to the Earth, to the creatures being harmed and killed, to the people whose livelihoods are being ruined, and imagine the cessation of damage, harm, and killing.

Please join me in this. If you want to do this in groups, all the better. If you want to do it more than once a day, great. And it goes without saying that if the opportunity for any kind of remedial action is placed before us as individuals, even if it’s just bringing bottles of Dawn detergent down to a local charity that’s helping with the bird cleanup, then add your actions to your thoughts.

Please share this with all of your friends.

--Angela

"What counts is not the enormity of the task, but the size of the courage." (Matthieu Ricard)

Poem

Last month I wrote a "placeholder" post stating that I had tried to write about the passing of my mother-in-law, but was unable to do so and gave up after a couple of tries. I said I would try again, but I doubt I could do any better than I could then. So instead, although I am not a poet in any way, shape, or form, I offer this poem, composed in my head while in the car on the way to the funeral and finished the next day.


While driving to a funeral



Bobby is gone, gone, gone beyond
Gate gate paragate
Parasamgate bodhi svaha
Her son at the wheel driving east
Rain is lashing at the windshield,
spraying up from the passing trucks
and while thinking of how we pass
from life into death, around us
life continues its circus
in the sheeting rain, driving wind
Massachusetts bumper stickers:
Obama is still President,
My Other Car is still a Broom,
Jesus Saves and the Yankees still suck
This my home state, and now, and now
One last journey to the North Shore
At least for reasons tied to blood
And bone, and the love of this man
And the others who share that blood

And how strangely appropriate
The blinding rain and shrieking wind
To sagas stories and plot lines
To complicated webs of past,
To layers of pride and of doubt
To all the love and the anger
Kneaded into the famous bread
And those who came to adulthood
In the eye of this hurricane
Each making their own peace with her
She was not my mother, and yes
I saw the complicated side
But I loved her for bringing him
Into the world in the first place,
And for what she wanted to be,
And for the things she tried to be,
And was, when clarity could cut
Through what had been handed to her.
A friend of mine once said to me
“One can be a difficult parent
And still be a great friend,” and
She was that to me, and it is
A terrible thing to witness
A heart beating in the shambles
That Alzheimer’s leaves in its wake--
So you will understand, when I
Saw the ashes mixed with earth, why
I spoke the mantra “gone beyond”

Gate gate paragate
Parasamgate bodhi svaha

the doorless doors of the Pure Land
do not require us to bring
All of our Stuff along with us
No eyes no ears no nose no mouth
No junk no faults no garbage, but
Just the cloudless blue sky of mind.

March 14, 2010

The Undergraduate Saga: Installment 1

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my experience as an undergraduate, and I’ve decided that writing about it might be, oh, cathartic. Not sure why it’s coming up now – it was over thirty years ago, and I thought it was all behind me. Interestingly, it is the period of my life that I talked the least about to my therapist during my billion years of therapy, so that may explain a lot. Then recently, a colleague of mine asked me “what path I had taken” academically to get to the place where I am now, because she wanted to advise a student. My advice to the student: don’t try this at home.

So, this is my Undergraduate Saga; a kind of mental spring cleaning, if you will. Since I know many of my own students read this, I will describe it as a cautionary tale, or how NOT to conduct your undergraduate career. It may be hard to imagine your crusty old professor having these experiences, but believe me, I am not making this up.

My high school graduating class had something like 350 people in it. I excelled academically in high school, and for reasons that had mostly to do with the fact that I was the lead singer and keyboard player in a local rock band and was always singing in high school shows, I was voted class musician. My audition at the large northeastern university where I did my undergrad work, however, was a disaster. I had studied classical piano as a kid, but for the 4 years or so previous to my audition I had mostly played popular music and mostly by ear, in addition to playing guitar, singing in the concert choir at school, and singing in the aforementioned rock band. I took some brush-up lessons with my choral director, Mr. Wrinn, and then drove over to the university to audition, with my high-school-boyfriend along for moral support. No one greeted me. I had no idea where I was going. I have no recollection of filling out any forms, no recollection of anything, really, except waiting outside the studio, petrified. I played my half-baked Mozart sonata for three European conservatory-trained musicians. After I had played, they asked me (with barely concealed disdain) who had suggested that I come to audition. I was totally terrified, and frankly I don’t remember my answer. The two Germans then raked me over the coals for awhile with a bunch of technical questions while the British one sat quietly and said nothing.

Needless to say, I was rejected. I was devastated. When I got the official rejection letter from the music school, I left it lying on the table where my parents would find it, because I couldn’t tell them. My Dad found it, and the only thing he said to me was “I’m disappointed.” I wanted to die. I don’t remember my mother’s reaction, for some reason.

However, the University itself had accepted me with flags flying, because I was one of three valedictorians of my class. It was too late to re-activate my applications to the two small liberal arts schools to which I had applied, and anyhow, my parents had agreed to pay for the large state school, so that’s where I was going, music major or not. I went to the art department (I had taken 4 years of art in high school as well, and was pretty good), but they wouldn’t even look at a portfolio because the “deadline was past.” Thinking that perhaps I could get involved in some of the musical activities if I was at least a Fine Arts major, I declared as a theater major. This was, of course, daft.

Freshman orientation was hot, humid, and miserable. Back in those days, one’s parent dropped one off at Freshman orientation and said “See ya.” (I am still astounded by the current generation, who show up to auditions and orientations with their family and all sets of grandparents and then use their umbilical cell phones through the entirety of college. My theory is that their parents—my generation—still remember going into that freshman orientation all by themselves feeling as though they were walking into Mordor, and they don’t want their kids to experience that, so the pendulum has swung the other way.) At the initial meeting, they herded all the new College of Arts and Sciences kids into a huge auditorium, where some stuffed shirt gave us a speech that began with the sentence “If there’s anyone in this room who wants to get a job when they finish school, I suggest you leave this room immediately and go over to the next building where Computer Science is meeting.” And a warm welcome to you too, asshole.

On a brighter note, with my academic record, I was instantly accepted into the Honors College. At this particular school, acceptance into the Honors College meant that all the University’s core requirements were waived – you only had to take the courses required by your major department, and all the rest were electives. I was in hog heaven. Being a jaded old college professor now, it’s easy to forget how exciting a college course catalog can be for a freshman from Podunk High. I instantly signed up for two junior/senior level courses: Shakespeare and a course in Arthurian Legend, in addition to two introductory theater courses and probably something else that I don’t recall.

And then it was Fall semester. Within the first two weeks it became obvious that Theater was probably not my future. No surprise - my acting career had been limited to the chorus of the HMS Pinafore in 5th grade, a stage play in the 7th grade which I do not remember, and the senior show at my high school, in which I played Lois Lane and got inadvertently punched in the face during a rehearsal by Eddie Waskiewicz, who was playing Batman. One of our first assignments was to choose our favorite poem and deliver it from memory to the class. I thought it would be hilarious to do John Lennon’s poem “The Fat Budgie.” After all, everyone likes comedy, right? And I had been nearly thrown out of high school study hall one day for having uncontrolled hysterics while reading In His Own Write.

I have a little Budgie
He is my very pal
I take him walks in Britain
I hope I always shall

My Budgie’s name is Jeffrey
My Grandad’s name’s the same
I named him after Grandad
Who had a feathered brain.

He’s getting very fat you know
From eating far too much
If he gets any fatter
He’ll have to wear a crutch…

…So that’s my budgie Jeffrey
Fat and yellow too
I love him more than Daddy
And I’m only 32.

The professor did not share my sense of humor. She looked at me and said, in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “And THAT…is your favorite poem?” They were obviously not looking for comic actors. In my other theater class I was assigned a film review, at which point I raised my hand and asked how I, a freshman, could possibly know enough about film or theater to actually think I could write a review of a bunch of professionals (obviously a question over which most critics do not lose sleep.) I don’t remember the professor’s answer, but he also was not amused.

About a month into this travesty I discovered that the music department was open to the idea of letting students re-audition on another instrument if they had not passed the first time. I jumped at this chance and decided to audition on voice. Since all my paperwork indicated that I intended to be a theory major, they were perplexed (it had been a long time since the Middle Ages, when that wouldn’t have seemed the slightest bit strange.) I was sent to meet with a music professor who also had some role in undergraduate admissions. He asked me why I wanted to audition on voice, then asked me what other instruments I played. When I said “guitar,” made a face and said “And how well do you play that – as well as you play the piano?” I don’t remember what I said in reply (I do remember what I was thinking, which was something like “Thanks a lot, dickhead.”) He agreed to let me audition—right then and there, with no preparation at all; just sent me packing off to the building where the vocal studios were.

So I sang for the three voice faculty. I had nothing prepared – I had never done a vocal audition in my life and had no idea what was expected or what was required. They were kind, but bewildered by this, until one of them – I will never forget – decided to improvise and just said to me, “Do you know the old song “Drink to me Only With Thine Eyes?” Yes, I did (ironically, because I had played the freaking thing on the now-highly-suspect piano.) They had the lyrics there in a book, so I sang it. They then put some music in front of me to test my reading; I read it through at first sight. They tested my ears with some pitch matching and other exercises; I nailed them all. They did not make fun of me; in fact one of them said that I had the ‘perfect name for a singer.’ (That would not be Dharmonia, but my actual name, which is about as Italian as you can get without turning into a cannoli.)

They then sent me chugging back to the fire-breathing dragon who had asked me if I played the guitar “as well as I play the piano.” Unbeknownst to me, while I was auditioning, they had somehow gotten my high school choral teacher on the phone. Mr Wrinn, may he rest in eternal peace and happiness, had pointedly asked this dragon if he was aware of the fact that I was one of the valedictorians of my class, the “class musician,” a songwriter who had already taken private theory lessons for two years, and simply was unfortunate enough to be a person who had learned most of her music entirely by ear and just needed a chance to be given some training. With that, and the fact that the three voice professors had actually accepted me, this paragon of tact informed me that they had “decided to give me a chance.”

And that is how I became a music major at a large state school. They then gave me the theory placement test, which I aced except for the section on medieval modes, since I had never had that before. Life can be ironic.


Stay tuned for Installment 2.

Placeholder

This month has had so much emotional input that I cannot even work through it enough to write about it. My mother-in-law, whom I have known now for 28 years, passed away March 2. I will write about her in good time, but for some reason am unable to do so yet; after two unsuccessful attempts, I have decided to let it settle for awhile before I try again. For now, may she rest in peace, free of the plague that is Alzheimer's.

From "Meditative Gardening"

Great quote from the upcoming-birthday-present-book I received from my Mom, "Meditative Gardening," by Cheryl Wilfong. Obviously it's about more than gardening.

"While Loving-Kindness is the heart's natural response to another being, Compassion is the heart's response to seeing another living being suffer. This includes watching someone wrestle with her particular Root of Stress. After diagnosing myself as an aversive personality type, I now easily recognize others in my "family" of Aversion. I used to defend myself from feeling their Suffering by thinking "That's not right...If they'd only...They should..." Nowadays, when I watch another aversive person try to halt what's unpleasant (by complaining, judging, or expressing annoyance) I recognize a pattern that is deeply familiar to me--and, rather than feeling repelled by that person's actions or speech, my heart opens to them."


Ah, is that what they call it--aversive personality type? Pass the mirror, please. What a concept: to stop one's own aversive behavior and simultaneously cultivate compassion for everyone else who's doing it. Gotta work on that.

The Thin Place

The Irish have an expression, “A Thin Place,” that refers to a location where This World and The Other World meet: a sacred mound, a holy well, or any number of other places. It’s my own opinion that there is also a phenomenon that one could describe as “A Thin Day,” or period of a couple or several days, when This World and The Other World seem to be phasing in and out. I don’t know why these phenomena occur on some days and not others; astrologers could probably tell us, or maybe it has some other scientific cause that hasn’t been discovered yet so that people still think it’s magic, like fire. Or, perhaps, like most phenomena, it is a product of our minds. Hell, maybe it’s the result of seeing both “Ground Hog Day” and “Buckaroo Banzai through the Eighth Dimension” within a 24-hour period; Wherever You Go, There You Are, and are and are and are.

I began the day yesterday pondering the passage of time, as a young friend whom I had met when she was about 16 turned 24 and, rather than being taken out to brunch, made brunch for everyone else. We went to her new apartment and I looked at all the pictures on her wall, of various ancestors and family members. She has an obsession with J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan, and a bookcase shelf full of his books. She has more light and youthful spirit and grace than Tinkerbelle, and yet all around her, ancestors look kindly down. Not just from the walls, from which their visages smile, but in the abundance of inheritance: Grandpa made the furniture cabinet, and a strange canteen-shaped ceramic pot that belonged to Grandma hangs curiously in a macramé-style hanger, dangling precipitously over the unwitting head of the potential victim sitting in the chair underneath it. Time has passed; she has lived in West Texas for years, but her parents live in Houston now, her brother is fighting in Iraq. Just yesterday she was a little kid learning Irish fiddle, now she is a graduate student writing a thesis about the medieval fiddle called the vielle, and makes killer cinnamon buns and biscuits and oatmeal that is exactly the right texture. Last summer she went to Vancouver Early Music and studied medieval music with Sequentia; just yesterday I did the same thing, or was it two decades ago?

In the afternoon, I went to a concert given by some of my colleagues. One of the pieces was a 20-minute tour-de-force for electronic tape and piano, played brilliantly by one of our theory-composition colleagues who did not write the piece, but interpreted it with a beauty and depth that was awe-inspiring. The piece had been written as a meditation on the death of the composer’s sister; the sonic landscape was rich and varied and intense and drew upon everything from mathematical ratios to Zen chant. I cried during it and was speechless at the end, until I remarked to Coyotebanjo that “for a person with synaesthesia, it was about as intense as an acid trip.” Synaesthesia is a phenomenon experienced by people for whom the stimulation of one sense produces a response from another sense: the texture of an object produces the sensation of a taste in the mouth, or colors have smells, or in my case, sounds produce vivid visual images. That piece was followed by another compositional tour-de-force, a four-movement piece by a very talented colleague based on the story in the Lotus Sutra of the Dragon-King’s Daughter, who reaches Enlightenment at the age of 8. The piece included dancers and a huge screen onto which beautiful abstract graphics were projected. At the end of the concert I was completely exhausted by the intensity of the experience.

In the evening, C went to rehearsal after preparing a whole bunch of food with which to make home-made pizzas for a little Super Bowl party. The Super Bowl is a little weird for me, because my father, who loved to watch the Super Bowl and used to look forward to it every year, died the night before Super Bowl 1997, 13 years ago. He had mentioned to my sister and my mother several times that week how much he was looking forward to watching it. I figure he either missed it or had a ringside seat… but I think of it every year. After my Dad passed away, I said to my Mom and sister that my Dad had told me several times during his life that when he died, he wanted to be marched down the streets with a band playing “When The Saints Go Marching In” like they do in New Orleans. It was then discovered that he had said the same thing, at various and separate times, to both my sister and my Mom. So at his funeral service, his jazz friends, including his 2 jazz-playing sons-in-law, played “When The Saints Go Marching In” while they carried his casket out of the church. This year, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl; a momentous occasion, since they had never even played in it, never mind won it. The TV cameras showed the crowds back in New Orleans going wild and screaming and dancing on Bourbon Street, and I thought of “When The Saints Go Marching In,” and my Dad, who always rooted for the underdog, and how he would have loved watching the Saints win that game, and how he would have seen the crowds on Bourbon Street and said to me, as he always did, “When I die I want one of those bands to march me to the cemetery.”

During the Saints-Colts Super Bowl game a number of friends came over, including a new friend, a composer from Michigan who also plays Irish traditional music, so we had a lively session. It’s been a long time since we had a session; it’s been painful to play without our friend Coop, who almost left this world after a case of life-threatening and virulent pneumonia had him on a respirator in intensive care for seventy-something days. He is miraculously recovering, to our great joy, and he would have been at the session too, if it wasn’t so cold and miserable out; but he needs to recover some more before throwing himself out into the winter wind. We missed him at the session; but we know he’ll be back soon.

That was all yesterday. This morning it was cold and misty, raining and icy. C sat down with his computer and had an e-mail from his brother; their Mom is in the hospital in Providence.

C’s mother has Alzheimer’s. She’s had it for awhile. After her husband, C’s step-dad, passed away this summer, she had to go to an assisted living facility in Providence. It’s an exceptionally nice one, and we feel fortunate to have found it.

She lost the ability to speak coherently awhile ago. Mostly, she has just walked. She’d get on her walker and just walk, back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the facility to the other, most all of the time when she wasn’t either sleeping or eating.

Sometimes she knows us, or seems to, and sometimes she doesn’t. She seems to know C’s younger brother and his wife, who have been nothing short of heroic during the last couple of years of her decline. Both of Chris’ brothers and their wives have just been incredible through the whole thing, and since we live 2000 miles away we feel a great deal of gratitude and appreciation for this.

So C’s younger brother’s e-mail of this morning explained that their Mom had a sudden decline. She had seemed to be ill, stomach-flu kind of thing, but after stabilizing her in the hospital it transpired that she could no longer walk. This did not appear to be the result of anything physically wrong with her legs. She also will not eat.

I don’t know anything about Alzheimer’s other than the things that I have read since she was diagnosed, but this doesn’t sound good. But, then, what is “good?” What are we supposed to “hope” for in a case like this? I think if it were me, I would hope that I would slip out of my body easily and end the suffering of being in a body with brain full of data and a busted hard drive. I find myself “hoping” these things for her: for peace, for as little suffering and fear as possible, for no pain, and frankly, for escape.

We went to work. I got an e-mail from my Mom. A family friend had lost her father Saturday night. The night before the Super Bowl. Hmmm. I called my Mom, who did not remember that my Dad had passed away the night before the Super Bowl. We talked about that, and about her visit to my Aunt Dottie.

My aunt Dottie has Alzheimer’s. She is my late Dad’s late brother’s ex-wife (got that?). I don’t remember how old she is. My mother goes to visit her once a week. Dottie is, as far as I can tell, in that stage of Alzheimer’s that the local assisted living facility calls “pleasantly confused.” She enjoys my mother’s visits.

Until recently, my mom had also been taking Dottie’s sister to see her occasionally. Dottie’s sister hasn’t been well, and this past weekend she passed away. My Mom went in to visit Dottie, who had not yet been told about her sister’s passing, and found her completely beside herself. For some reason, she had become lucidly aware of the fact that she could not remember anything, and was in a state of panic, as if she had just realized the truth of her condition. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t remember anything. What will I do? If I go somewhere I’ll get lost. What will I do?” My mother spent a good amount of time calming her down: you’re in a safe place, you won’t get lost, everyone here loves you and takes care of you, your son comes to see you and brings you to his house all the time, everything is OK. Dottie was still upset: “But I can’t remember anything. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.” And my mother (the lifelong Congregational Protestant) said to her, “Dottie, you don’t have to. All that matters is now. We have to make a Buddhist out of you—the past doesn’t matter, the future doesn’t matter, just right now.” My mother told me, “I was trying to make her laugh.” And apparently it did. And I laughed too, on the other end of the phone, and cried also, with tears running down my face, although Mom didn’t know that. How do you know the guy sitting next to you isn’t a Buddha? The Buddha taught that all sentient beings have been our Mother; apparently, mothers can occasionally be our Buddhas, too.

My mother wondered if Dottie had had an “ESP” experience of communication with her sister, and if that had somehow set her off; if she had an experience that she felt intensely but then could not remember. I didn’t know. I reminded my Mom that when my Dad’s mother had passed away, one of my cousins told me that the night before she passed, she had told my cousin that she had been visited by her (deceased) brother and sister. These things happen. The day my Dad passed he asked my Mom who “that guy was” who was standing by her; she told him that there was no “guy” there, and he said “Do you mean to tell me you don’t see that guy?” I have always wondered who That Guy was. I have no idea if my mother remembers this. I didn’t mention it to her.

Tonight in Early Music Ensemble we worked on two songs by Thomas Tallis; more images of passing over to the other side, including his deeply beautiful Procul recedant somnia, a setting of a passage from the Compline prayer Te lucis ante terminum. “Lord, as the light subsides at the end of the day, keep us safe from all those phantasmagoric dreams and nightmares and the defilements of the body.” Great monastic 16th century stuff, with some harmonic changes in it that would have made Gesualdo happy. Then on to the next composer’s forum concert, where our new friend had two pieces performed; one inspired by Sufi poetry and a performance of the late, great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; the other a piece for voice and orchestra inspired by epitaphs from old graveyards in New Hampshire. Both were beautiful and extremely intense meditations on life and death. The second work included a movement whose text was the epitaph of a two-year old. I cried through most of it.

I cry a lot at concerts; if music moves me, the water works start. I used to be embarrassed by this, but I don’t give a damn anymore. Let ‘em see me cry, I don’t care. People don’t become musicians for the money-that’s obvious. Most of us become musicians because at some point in our lives we realize that we’re both stimulated into a transcendent state and struck dumb and senseless by music and can no longer live without doing that forevermore, the thing that before the advent of recording was the most impermanent and ephemeral of all the arts, heard and then gone forever. Just so, you never feel more alive than when you truly realize that you, too, are going to die; in the moment of that fleeting realization, we are in the ultimate “thin place,” where there is in fact no life and no death, just calm clear light mind; where there is no past and no future, just Right Now.

Brain-Tilt

Posting this mostly for the sake of finding out if anyone else experiences the following syndrome, and if they do, what strategies they use for dealing with it.

When referring to the syndrome as it happens to me personally, I call it the “mental paralysis” syndrome. It is a state of mind characterized by frenzied mental activity that occurs simultaneously with no apparent productivity other than staring at something, be it a book, a piece of work one is supposed to be doing, or a computer screen. If one’s brain were a copy machine, it would be the equivalent of a paper jam.

For me, there are several things that are guaranteed to bring on this wheel-spinning mess. One is a complete state of overwhelm—when the “to do” list reaches a certain point, the “memory full” prompt goes on and all activity ceases. The same thing can be caused by a fit of depression, a disappointment, a really positive and exciting thing that has now completely taken over my untrainable mind, something that is worrying me, or a personal or relationship-related conflict with someone (even a remarkably minor one -- or, I confess, one that turns out to have been imagined.)

A previous boss of mine once told me in an informal job evaluation that her only concern about me in terms of my employment performance was time management. I knew exactly what she meant, but I didn’t let on that the “time management” problems I have are almost always a result of this incredibly annoying “stop the presses” thing that my brain does.

You’d think meditation would help…it probably has; God knows what my brain would be like otherwise, but it hasn’t licked it. I want it to Stop Now. Does anyone have any suggestions? Anyone have this problem, and found a way to overcome it? I have a hell of a lot of work to do and it ain’t gonna stop anytime soon.

Grades Schmades

I was inspired to write this post tonight by a friend and former student who found herself in the difficult position of having to give a student of her own, for a number of legitimate reasons, a D on a paper. Needless to say, there were repercussions.
Grading is one of the most vexing things I have to do as a professor. I hate grades, and I generally find them to be meaningless. This is becoming more and more true in our educational system, in which grades have become irrelevant in terms of actual meaning while simultaneously becoming the only marker by which most students feel they are getting their "money's worth" out of their school experience.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I find grades "irrelevant." The syndrome known as “grade inflation” has reached the point in this country where we are in a de facto pass/fail system, with "pass" being an "A" and fail being "everything else." A justly-earned "C" is something that many students have never even seen on their transcripts; if they handed in all their work and passed their exams, they were basically guaranteed a B, and anything lower prompted a school visit by hysterical parents. As a result of this lamentable situation, the disparity in both product and effort which we professors are expected to reward with an "A" is mind-boggling. “A” no longer connotes excellence; it now means “the student has fulfilled the requirements of the class.”

I spent a long time, when I first started teaching in college, worrying that by doling out “A”s the way we now do, I am “lying” to the average students and short-changing the excellent ones. I finally let that go. The truth is this: the A meant something different to me than it means to them, and I need to be willing to recognize that I need to grade them according to the current paradigm, which at this point has been determined by consensus. If the consensus says that “A” means “I gave this my best effort, did all the work in the class, studied, spent hours on my paper, and turned everything in on time,” then the student who has done that is expecting an “A”, and will be justifiably shocked, grieved and mystified if he or she gets something lower, even if this student can’t do an ounce of critical thinking and writes at a 10th-grade level.

This is not going to change anytime soon. We are never going to go back to the day when a "C" meant "average" and an A meant "exceeds expectations." However, I would put forth that the blame for this cannot be laid completely at the feet of the educational system; in my opinion, the actual reasons for this state of affairs are driven by environmental and economic issues. Our economy is such that competition for middle- to upper-income jobs is fierce. This was true way before the recent economic downturn. Faced with 200 applicants for every one opening in higher education, law, and many kinds of business, both graduate institutions and potential employers tend to simply skim off the 3.5 and aboves. Given that, I present the following scenario: suppose I have a student who is reliable, hard-working, follows directions, and turns everything in on time, but has a reading and writing level that in my day would have been considered about right for a high-school sophomore. How can I, in good conscience, give this a earnest student a well-deserved C because he or she has non-existent critical thinking skills, has trouble making their way through a book with no pictures, and can't write their way out of a paper bag, knowing that the damage to their cumulative average will basically hamstring them when they apply for a job? (Or worse, for graduate school, which raises the very upsetting issue of the caliber of students we accept into graduate programs these days – but that’s a topic for another blogpost.)

The answer is: I can’t. So I give them the A, because they have worked hard and they have fulfilled the requirements of the class, and that is now what is meant by “A.” Does this drive me nuts? Yes. Do I think that by sticking to my guns I would contribute to changing the educational system? No. Frankly, all it would do is put the student in a state of misery and despair. It might even get me a free trip to the Dean’s Office, which I know has happened to various academic colleagues of mine.

Mind you, I’m not talking about students who blow off class, hand things in late, read Facebook in the back of class on their iPhones, and hand me bullshit papers copied verbatim from Wikipedia with one word changed in the hopes that I won’t discover it by Googling their text. Those fools can take the Cs and Ds; my only regret is that they will probably be my Congressperson some day. I’m more worried about the decent and hardworking students who simply do not possess the academic skills that an “A” used to represent back in the mists of time.

How did we get to this state? Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth: Our educational system, particularly its grading protocol, is still based on an elitist paradigm that assumes that “not everyone is college material.” That paradigm assumed that those who weren’t “college material” would flunk out, not because they blew off class smoking weed or plagiarized their papers, but because they couldn’t hack the level of work that was expected to PASS – not to get an A, but to PASS – a college course. That paradigm is now irrelevant. Everyone needs to go to college now, not because of President Obama’s laudable initiatives, but because the first two years of college are now High School Part II. For a lot of people, the university is their last-ditch chance to receive the basic, well-rounded education that they should have gotten in high school, but which is rarely found in high-school anymore because high school teachers are more or less required to “teach to tests.” Until our cotton-brained legislators stop handing out funding according to test scores, that will continue; in the meantime, a shockingly large number of our high schools do not prepare people for the level of college work that was represented by that old elitist paradigm.

The new prevailing consensus that everyone should be able to go to college means that we will continue to have huge populations of 18-25 year-old students in need of higher education—but because of the level of education denied to them by our crippling high school testing systems, the grading criteria that came into being with the old paradigm is no longer relevant. We hold onto it like pit bulls, however, because we can’t agree on an alternative that works, especially at large institutions. I would like nothing better than to have 25 students per semester, and to write a concise and thoughtful summation of the progress of each one, with no letter grade attached. It seems to me that this would be more useful and educational to each one of them than anything else. However, this is not practical or feasible in a large university setting where classes have become so behemoth that we are reduced to “testing” them by giving them on-line multiple-choice exams, an exercise that in my opinion is only about one step away from taking a trivia quiz at a bar with those little clicker-doohickies. And we’re supposed to hand them grades based on a system that was designed for Harvard and Oxford seminar classes?

Bottom line: we need to come up with assessment systems that have something to do with reality.

Classes with 400 people doing multiple-choice exams online (and cheating like bandits) should be worth fewer credit hours for the students and higher courseload credit for the professors, for whom they are an enormous amount of work and hassle, and they should be graded pass-fail. After all, most of them are intended to provide some kind of liberal arts experience, provide an introduction to a field of study, or satisfy a requirement. Large-enrollment on-line courses with only one professor (and maybe a couple of TAs) should be assessed in the same way.

Average-sized classes and smaller on-line courses, in which the professors actually have a reasonable amount of one-on-one contact with the students, should be graded according to three parameters: the student exceeded the requirements of the class, the student successfully fulfilled the requirements of the class, or the student did not fulfill the requirements of the class and must either repeat the class or receive no credit. And, it should be understood and made clear that the second of the above assessments is the norm, which will be the grade achieved by the majority of students in the majority of their classes.

For small, seminar-style classes and comparable on-line courses in which there is a lot of interaction between the instructor and the student, the assessment should be as in (2) above, with an additional written individual assessment of each student. These could prove to be extremely useful to a student, who could attach them to a CV, where they would be a hundred times more useful to a future employer or graduate admissions office than these new on-line boilerplate letters of recommendation (“Of the twenty billion students I’ve had over the past 10 years, I would rate Mr. Whippensnappit in the top 5 per cent.”) Obviously this is more work for the professor, which is why I am only advocating this assessment method for small (under 10) seminar-style classes, which are rare in large universities and almost non-existent at the undergraduate level.

All this is pie in the sky, of course. It would take an act of Congress or possibly an alien invasion to get all the university systems in this country to agree to a new grading system. In the meantime, I will grade according to the new paradigm, no matter how much it rankles me; and when I have classes that are small enough to make it possible, I will continue to give my students very specific written assessments of their work, in the hope that they will actually get some benefit from the time they spend with me. Because in the end, that’s really all that matters.

Unraveling

I wrote this last week and never posted it, because it seemed to be a little too self-absorbed (although hell, it’s a blog, right? Isn’t the unwritten title of every blog “All About Me?”) Ever since I wrote it, I have dreamed every night of several of the characters involved, and have decided that I need to post it. Maybe it will help someone; I don’t know. Here it is, for what it’s worth.

I love modal music. For the non-musicians reading this, “modal” music that is not based on our “do-re-mi” scale, but rather on certain scales that have been around since antiquity, and can be heard by our modern ears as major or minor scales with a note altered here and there. The use of modal scales is the element that makes both folk music and Gregorian chant sound “olde” with an “e.” It’s the reason why, when we medieval music nerds say that we “play medieval music,” an occasional person will reply “Oh, I love that Celtic stuff.” They aren’t crazy – most of it is modal. So are a Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin songs. As a kid, after repeatedly playing my Bach and Bartok piano pieces until my family nearly lost their minds, my modal journey wandered through Beatles, British Invasion, Folk Revival, Tull, Zeppelin, Pentangle, assorted Renaissance dances and madrigals, the odd Dufay Mass in undergraduate Collegium, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Irish, Scottish and English traditional music…and then I hit the modal motherlode: western medieval music.

Now, the term “medieval music” covers a lot of ground. Sacred chant; song settings of gorgeous Latin and vernacular poetry; complex pieces in multiple meters crafted with all kind of number symbolism; energetic dances, some of which take some serious chops to play; and polyphonic part-music full of quartal harmonies and crunchy dissonances that trick undergrads into thinking they were composed last week. It is beautiful, and it is every bit as worthy of study as any other aspect of our music history. It’s ridiculous that music history classes sometimes treat it like the frozen peas you have to choke down so that you can eat your chocolate cake – “Here, dear, listen to this Gregorian chant and then you can hear some Mozart / Stravinsky, I promise.” Ridiculous – I don’t see literature professors apologizing for Dante. Medieval music shows us that western music grew from a process that involved mode and memory and improvisation and making text seem even more alive by skillfully setting it to notes – sounds like a lot of traditional and popular musics, doesn’t it? And in that regard, ironically, it’s closer to what we do now than a large chunk of the music that was created in the intervening centuries. Relevant? I’d say. Even the texts are relevant. (We haven’t changed that much, alas.)

It was not a particularly easy decision to pursue medieval music, but it felt “right,” and then one night after sobbing through an entire performance by Sequentia at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge I was convinced I was making the right choice. A year later, when I auditioned for the Early Music Institute at IU, they asked me why, after 10 years as a working musician, I wanted to go back to school. I told them I wanted to study medieval music, and that I wanted to teach at the college level and direct early music ensembles, and that I wasn’t harboring any illusions that I would become a famous super-chops early music singer at my then-age of 32. Fortunately, that made sense to them; and leave it to Tom Binkley to take a chance on a rock singer.

It was hard. I had to catch up with the others. I had to fight with my debilitating performance anxiety. I had to deal with a crazy and stressful music school with 1600 music majors. I had to learn how to be a scholar and not just a decent student, and be a performer on top of everything else.

Right after the second year, after not passing my masters’ recital hearing (long story), I took myself to Vancouver BC and enrolled myself in Sequentia’s Medieval Programme. The first day, everyone sits in a kind of informal circle and sings or plays for each other. I didn’t know this, and wasn’t prepared. Now, “Not prepared” at IU meant a large trap door would open and send you screaming into the Cracks of Doom, and these were two of my all-time musical heroes. (I refer you back to the sobbing in Sanders Theater story.) I was shaking in my boots. My turn came, and I opened my mouth and very little sound came out. It probably wasn’t as bad as I remember it, but I remember something that sounded like a cross between a squeak and a croak with some semblance of pitch added. I did eventually recover, but I had done it: my first impression was made.

I had two options. I could go hide behind the potted palms for two weeks, or I could suck it up and go talk to Barbara Thornton, tell her about my recent horrific experience and talk to her about the performance anxiety problem that was getting worse. What did I have to lose? What could get worse? Thus began my relationship with two of the most influential, dear, and profound teachers I ever was blessed to learn from.

Some of you who are reading this have heard this story: I told Barbara my tale of woe, and she listened; really listened intently to my whole story. (Barbara was a fairly intense person.) When I was finished she said she understood that I was already a professional musician, but how long had I been doing early music? I told her, just a couple of years. She said, “I hope you understand that that’s really not much time at all.” After a brief encouraging conversation, she said “Here’s the problem. Imagine you’re a sweater. You’ve decide to completely unravel yourself and knit yourself back up into a totally different sweater.” I nodded, trying not to cry. “Right now,” she said, “You are a pile of yarn on the floor.” This was simultaneously so accurate, so sad, so damned funny, and said with so much kindness that I actually laughed. “You have to be patient while you knit yourself back up.”

Several years later, at the same workshop, after several of us had acted as sort of teaching assistants for a program that ended up as a public performance, she gave each of us a little card and a small gift, which was a totem from the Native American museum there. Her card to me said “To She Who Knit Herself Back Up.”

Many years have passed since then. Ironically, I have become exactly what I described to my IU interrogators on that day back in March of 1987, teaching early music history and directing an ensemble, trying to convey to students that medieval music is actually pretty cool, and you can learn how to tell a trope from a prosula without being so bored to oblivion that you pass out in your coffee. But, here’s the rub: in those intervening 20+ years, something else happened to me, which is that I actually had the great privilege of being able to immerse myself in this music that I loved. I got to make CDs, and write and narrate nationally-syndicated radio programs. I studied with amazing performers, and I got to take the music all over creation, from Vancouver to Boston to Galway to Utrecht to Regensberg, got to hear the music ringing out in the spaces it was written for, got to play with and hang with people who love it as much as I do. I knit the sweater back up only to find that it fit damned well.

But as so often happens in life happens, I have had to make some choices. Perhaps I have not always made the right ones, but I like to think that I did the best I could with the situations and the resources with which I was presented. And now I live out on the prairie, in a place so isolated the meteorologists on the freaking Weather Channel stand in front of that part of the map. I can host a radio show, but I have no time to write a radio show any more because I’m too busy trying to juggle teaching full-time with finishing a doctorate because the administrators at a University these days are not willing to give you tenure on the basis of the concerts you played or the CDs you’ve made, the work you’ve done, your 500 radio scripts, the fact that you were inducted into the University’s Teaching Academy, or your three tracks on the freaking Norton Anthology of Recorded Music; they only want to see a certain Piece of Paper, and they want you to get that piece of paper while you’re teaching classes of 95 students, 40 of whom sort of want to be there are 55 of whom are trying to Facebook on their iPhones while you are attempting to teach them. I can’t seem to finish the book on medieval improvisation that I’m writing, necessary to finish DM and keep job on prairie, because I have to spend hours making my way through boxes of misspelled assignments, or reading and grading graduate papers so that I can help those students get the very degree that I can’t finish because my job requires me to spend hours doing things like reading and grading graduate papers, going to meetings, writing recommendations, and all the other things that a conscientious and decent professor does. And people want to know if I’ve toured much with our medieval ensemble lately?

Please don’t misunderstand me: I love teaching, and I know that I have a good life. I’m grateful that I’m employed. I love my students very much, and I’m happy that they want to learn from me. I’m glad to have been given the opportunity to come to somewhere only slightly less remote than the steppes of Mongolia and actually get some people excited about the same music that means so much to me. But sometimes I look at my early music colleagues who made the choice to live in other kinds of places, to concentrate on performing and teach “on the side” rather than the opposite way around, to create concert programs and bring joy to people who come to hear them play, and to participate in the sheer joy of making music at that level of quality and chops and integrity, and I see that sweater of mine, the one that I worked so hard to knit up, and it’s back on the floor, and in such terrible danger of becoming unraveled again…and I can’t let it unravel, I just can’t.

"This is not my beautiful blog..."

I have been finding myself thinking a lot about Choice lately. I am over a half-century old, and I still don’t know how to make good ones.

Aside from the obvious everyday events such as “whether to have the tall or the grande mocha,” we usually think of “choice” as something momentous and life changing: Choice with a capital “C.” But most seemingly momentous choices come about because of the result of a whole chain of smaller choices. In fact, the most insidious thing about the whole concept of choice is that most of us, I think, float along through life not even realizing that every day of our lives, practically everything we do or say is part of a long string of small choices.

For one thing, you got out of bed. “Oh, I have to; I have to go to work.” Well, yes, but you’re still deciding, aren’t you? You have decided to get up and go to work/school/ whatever. You could have decided not to. “No, I couldn’t; I’d lose my job.” Well, of course. That means you would have decided to risk losing your job. It’s still a choice.

Remember the Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime?”

You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

What are you doing with your life? You’ve chosen it, probably one step at a time, but there it is. Been married more than 10 seconds? Choice. Finished a degree? Choice. Didn’t finish a degree? Choice. Behind in your work? Choice. Put up with a bunch of crap that drives you crazy? Choice. Sorry.

Are we consciously aware of making all these choices every day? Not really. I don’t think “I’m choosing to brush my teeth right now,” although I am. I could skip it if I wanted to. I find teaching large classes almost intolerably stressful, but I have taught at least one class of anywhere from 95 to 460 students almost every semester that I have been a full-time professor. Why? Because I love the students, I think it’s a shame that they have to be herded into these huge anonymizing classes, I want to keep my job, and this job requires me to teach huge classes so that a bunch of bureaucrats can gas off about “student contact hours” in the legislature. Choice. The Chronicle of Higher Ed is just a click away; I could look at the job listings if I wanted to. There are schools whose entire student body is smaller than the History of Rock and Roll class that I taught for a number of semesters and still oversee. Choice. I could get a different teaching job. “But I wouldn’t get anywhere, because I’m still finishing my doctorate.” Choice. “But I didn’t choose to finish it, they made me finish it or else I wouldn’t get tenure.” Bullcrap, it’s my choice. I could have told them to shove it and looked for a different job; I did not.

You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife . .

Choice, choice, choice. I’ll have coffee instead of tea. I’ll have the scone instead of the apple. I’ll sleep another half hour instead of going for a walk. I’ll grade these papers tomorrow instead of today because I’m so stressed out…right…from the consequences of the other thirty-two stupid choices that I made in the last week.

Sometimes I feel as though there is a gremlin in my brain who is making these choices. Why am I not a full-time performer of medieval music who lives somewhere in New England so that it’s easier to fly to Europe where most of the gigs are? There’s a string of choices there long enough to make a prayer-mala (and not all of them bad). Why do I still only know 2 tunes on the button accordion I bought last summer? Why are there still things about my life, my relationships, my job, my creative life about which I feel unhappy, and why have those things been the same for decades, despite years of therapy?

You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

The problem is that one bad choice leads to another. Here’s a mundane, everyday example: I seem to gain weight in proportion to how unhappy I am (unless it gets to the psychic or emotional emergency point, in which case I start losing again, but that’s fortunately not the norm.) As you can imagine, that starts a pretty diabolical spiral, because when it comes to assuaging the unhappiness and futility of trying to jam the Pillsbury Doughboy into size 10 jeans, nothing beats chocolate. A hundred previous rotten choices have led to another one.

What would happen if we actually became aware of every single choice we made – and by aware, I mean aware that it is a choice? What if, when the alarm goes off at some horrid hour, we consciously thought “I am choosing to hit the snooze button and remain the shape of a couch-potato,” or conversely, “I am choosing to get up and go for a walk even though I feel like warmed-over crap because I chose to go to sleep very late last night.” I suspect that if we were aware of everything we were choosing, some of our choices would suddenly appear absurd at best and intensely self-destructive at worst. And yet, I’m not sure that would solve the problem, and here’s why: because I truly believe that there is a small part of all of us, or at least those of us who experience this syndrome, that doesn’t really believe in consequence. This is a horrific problem for many of the students I deal with: “I forgot to take the midterm, I can’t help it, I spaced it, isn’t there some extra credit thing that I can do to make up for it?” I get pissed off at them, but what am I doing differently? I blew off working on my doctorate for the last month because I felt overwhelmed by my teaching duties; can I do something for extra credit so you’ll give me tenure anyhow?

I can’t help but suspect that the same brain-gremlin who at some level doesn’t really, truly believe that practicing will make her play better is, in fact, the same brain-gremlin who doesn’t believe that eating differently and exercising more would bring that LDL down. It’s as though some part of my brain has rejected the entire concept of cause and effect, while giving lots of lip-service to believing in “karma” and castigating students for being ignorant of the consequences of their ill-informed actions.

Perhaps this is the root of the difference between “disciplined” and “undisciplined” individuals. My partner is one of the most disciplined individuals I have ever met. He also seems to not only understand concept of consequences but to accept it without any fuss or resistance. Anger, maybe, if someone else’s stupidity has caused bad consequences, but he’s pretty clear on the cause and effect part of the equation. (And OK, he’s a Capricorn, but you can’t attribute all of it to astrology!) Does is come from our very different ways of being raised: the “everything is somebody else’s goddamned fault” of my family vs the “everything is your own goddamned fault” of his, neither extreme being particularly helpful or healthy? What makes one person have faith in cause and effect and another person seem to operate as though there is no such thing?

Those of you who read this blog know that one of my favorite topics is that whole zen concept of “no results.” We are terribly attached to results; the idea is to make choices and engage in action out of the conviction that it is right action and right choice, and not in order to get the “cookies” you receive from getting the results you want/expect. This is going to sound contradictory, but I think it’s possible that those of us who can’t seem to “connect” with cause and effect and the consequences of our choices are actually more attached to results than those who are more like my aforementioned partner. Is our persistent refusal to make logical or healthy choices some kind of convoluted way to avoid disappointment, or the frustration of not getting results as quickly as you want, or not getting the desired results at all? After all, at some level, if you make a lousy choice, you know damned well what the lousy result will be, and at least that’s reliable. And if those lousy results don’t happen, well, at least you won’t be disappointed.

But where does it get you?

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was . . .

Let us Pray

I have a small “zendo” in my backyard that serves as a little “practice building.” That means yoga practice, meditation practice, various spiritual practices, and musical practice. It now has a piano in it, and the tuner stopped by the other day to evaluate it. Now, this is a wonderful guy: positive, friendly, helpful, skillful, just a gem. He is also, I think, a very serious Christian, one of the ones who practices what he preaches, which I admire. He looked around at all my thangkas and incense and offering bowls, which may very well have seemed like a pit of graven images to him; but if so, he didn’t let on. On the contrary, he said it was nice, and he complimented my meditation set-up: futon folded in half like a couch against the wall, meditation zabutons and cushions set on top. I told him that this room had been a great thing for my head, and called it my “mental health room.” I said it was a great place to meditate and contemplate. He said yes, a person sure needs that; either that or prayer, with so much going on these days.

It was the “or” that stopped my brain for a moment. He was being completely sincere and positive; it was clear that there was nothing negative intended at all. But what I do in there sure as hell feels like prayer to me. I said “Yes, well, I certainly do a lot of prayer in here as well.” And that’s true, although it may not match his definition. We laughed, and that was that.

However, it really got my wheels turning.

What is prayer anyhow? How could something that seems to straightforward to one person be an issue so fraught with complexity to someone else? I think I am a relatively sane person in the 21st century, but I admit that in one moment I can feel an urge to “pray” about something, in the next moment doubt the efficacy or even the sanity of prayer, and in the next moment consider requesting my Tibetan monk teachers to pray for my sick friends. A few minutes later I find myself wondering why on earth I feel as though some people’s prayers would have more “juice” than someone else’s (you’ll remember my Calvinist Brain Devil from other blogposts), even though on a purely intuitive and emotional level I find myself comforted by asking for prayers from other humans who seem to have more of that spiritual “juice” (the Calvinist Brain Devil has a Catholic roommate.) Either way, this train of thought doesn’t go in a straight line.

I have several friends right now who are seriously ill in one way or another. My first instinct is to pray for them, which I have been doing, and to ask others to do so, but wow! Prayer is really a Hot Button item for me, as I am discovering.

I was probably 6 or 7 when I figured out that the thing I call “praying to Jesus for a bike” doesn’t work. Oh, yes, I’ve seen the film “The Secret,” and even though I don't buy a number of things put forth in that film, I am open to the fact that maintaining a positive visualization might help something manifest in your life. (I must state, though, that the Calvinist Devil and all of his Catholic, Buddhist and Pagan roommates think that doing this for purely material objects or for money is a misuse of the above-mentioned Juice, unless you’re going to do some Good with that money.) But praying to an entity that exists separately from yourself – a God that is somehow “Other” -- I struggle with that.

I also figured out when I was about 6 or 7 that praying for other things – like “please don’t let Grandpa die” – doesn’t always work either. I say “not always,” because sometimes when you pray for a sick person, they actually do get well, and that starts the whole spiral of befuddlement again, at least in my brain. One could address that issue by invoking the idea that healing takes many forms, and that one might pray for someone’s “ultimate healing” or “ultimate good;” but that doesn’t always occur to a 7-year-old.

So even as a little child, lying there late at night trying to figure out what the hell the grownups meant by “going to sleep and never waking up,” and what that would feel like, I decided that there was something wrong with the whole picture. By the time I was around 12, I remember thinking that my Protestant elders’ explanation that “God works in mysterious ways” would possibly be more accurately expressed as “We are ignorant and don’t understand God.” And, I decided that the first thing we clearly didn’t understand was what or whom we were praying to. God was clearly not a greybearded Guy In the Sky who spent leisurely eons figuring out new ways to confound us, nor was he the strangely androgenous figure with the kindly face and the blue drapey head-scarf that I prayed to as a tiny kid, and whom I was visualizing whenever people said “God.” (Obviously, either some elderly Italian’s fervent prayers for the grandchild born of my parents’ shocking Catholic-Protestant union took root in the infant’s cerebral cortex and grew a beautiful Beata Vergine Maria, or I spent a previous life up in the hills of Umbria praying to a statue of Mary.)

So, young though I was and still unable to really articulate it, I figured that either 1) God doesn’t exist, or 2) “God” must actually be some kind of numinous collective energy that pervades everything. If you accept #2, then ironically #1 is also true; God doesn’t exist if your notion of God involves any kind of omnipotent creator-being separate from your own being. (So much for most of Earth’s great faith traditions.) I also decided that if we are all part of this numinous collective energy, then there is no reason why there could not be some aspect of our singular or collective being that “continued” after our bodies died, although my notions of what this “aspect of being” might be have changed back and forth over the years. For awhile, this helped with the whole praying problem: If “God” was some kind of pervasive energy, then the energy of one’s prayers could potentially have an effect on that collective energy, although it might not necessarily be the direct effect you’re going for. It also solved the conundrum of the bike. While you could conceivably hold a positive thought in your brain that might help certain circumstances manifest, the notion of “pervasive energy” going over to Target and getting you a bike is sort of like the joke a four-year-old friend of mine once told me, which began “So Coffee walks into a Bar.”

On the other hand, let’s stay with that bike for a minute, because this is where another aspect of this whole prayer notion gets stuck and spins its wheels in my brain, and brings us back to my tuner friend and that perplexing “Secret” movie. What, indeed, IS the difference between “praying” and “visualizing?” If you’re holding a positive thought in your mind with the notion that this positive energy will somehow have an effect, are you visualizing or are you praying? The conventional way we’re taught to “pray” implies a recipient. If there is no guy in the sky, who is the recipient of my prayer that my friend’s virulent pneumonia will abate? If I try to quiet my mind and visualize my friend with pink healthy lungs taking big long oxygen-soaked breaths, is that not “praying?” It sure as hell feels like praying to me. Do I need Jesus or Medicine Buddha to also visualize my friend with pink healthy lungs taking big long oxygen-soaked breaths in order for it to have a positive effect, or is it simply that the force generated by the collective experience of Jesus and Medicine Buddha makes the energy of the visualization stronger, and lights up more juncture-points in “Indra’s Net,” or the collective being of the universe? Might it not be the collective belief-force of 20 generations of Italians that causes my keys to show up if I ask Saint Anthony to help me locate them? Surely, if more people generate positive energy in a particular direction, more overall positive energy is generated; and surely this is why, when we are having problems or when someone we know is ill, we say to others “please pray for my friend.” And no, it doesn’t matter if one person is better at generating this energy than someone else. I remember making a request of my Tibetan spiritual teachers to please pray for a sick friend; they of course agreed that they would do a special healing practice at a particular given time, and then said to me “And you must do it too.”

Perhaps our understanding of prayer is just as messed up as our understanding of karma. I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard this argument: If you pray for someone and they don’t get better, it’s “karma.” It’s very easy to imagine how that can become a vortex of delusion. You can keep praying and not question the efficacy of that practice, because if it doesn’t work it ain’t because prayers don’t work, it’s because of that bastard Karma. Then you can go one step farther: why pray? The person will get well or they won’t; it’s their karma. Oh, but excuse me – what if it’s their karma that I pray for them? We can see where this argument is going, and that is what my dearly beloved calls “disappearing up your own butt.”

The bottom line: We don’t get it. I don’t think we understand prayer and I don’t think we understand Karma, and I think that we secretly fear that they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they exist perfectly together in a non-linear way. The collective universal “web” is too large and intricate to be viewed all at once – and we are, as usual, stuck like glue to the notion of Results. We want prayer to work in an obvious way, and we want good people to be rewarded and bad people to be blown away and we want it NOW. But we can’t have that, and we never will. We have to sit in the middle of the mess, and continue to visualize our friends’ pink healthy lungs full of oxygen, or cancer-free cervix, or safely-removed brain tumor; to ask our friends and spiritual guides to do so as well, if that’s what feels right to us; and continue to create positive energy even if we don’t know where those ripples of “karma” will go, or whether there will be any humanly-perceptible “results.” And if that’s not praying, I don’t know what is.


Postscript: halfway through the writing of this blogpost, yesterday, I received a message that one friend is now cancer-free. Deo gracias, quisquis Deus est.

When you learn music, just learn music

Continuing with one of my current obsessions, which is the teaching of improvisation and how that relates to meditation and other contemplative disciplines, here is a great quote from Ken Zuckerman, medieval lute and Indian sarod virtuoso who teaches medieval music and Indian music at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. In considering models for medieval improvisation, Zuckerman cites North Indian classical music as a model for “how an extensive unwritten repertoire can evolve.” That phrase and the following passage are quoted from Zuckerman’s article “Improvisation in medieval music” (full citation footnoted at the end of the post.) I can’t help but observe that one could substitute “Dharma” for “medieval music improvisation” as the subject being discussed here, and the same lesson would apply. In fact, Zuckerman quotes his Indian music teacher as saying “When you eat, you eat. When you sleep, you sleep. So – when you learn music, learn music! Why talk?” Sounds like Zen to me.

“…there is a general tendency for us in the western world to over-analyze and to attempt to understand aspects of music making with the intellect which must be first understood at other levels, such as the motor centers and emotions. It is a curious contradiction. On the one hand, we don’t seem to mind at all giving a child all the time he or she needs to learn to walk and run without any intellectual instructions, nor does the child ask for any. On the other hand, when it comes to a beginner in music, whatever his or her age, we insist on explaining many things which can only be understood and executed after much practice. Not only does this intellectual approach actually slow the more important process of intuitive and automatic learning, but it interferes with the students’ developing higher levels of listening and observation. Especially at more advanced levels of learning, it is precisely the moment of not understanding which should sharpen the students’ power of listening and observation – and not simply the impulse to formulate another question.” [italics mine]

Kenneth Zuckerman, “Improvisation in medieval music,” in Improvisation II. Internationale Tagung für Improvisation, edited by Walter Fähndrich (Lucerne: Amadeus, 1993),134-142.

Improvisation-Meditation

There is a misconception that musical improvisation is a sort of spontaneous flowing-forth of music out of thin air, or as the saying goes, out of “whole cloth.” In fact, improvisation in jazz, traditional music, early music, or just about any music I can think of requires that the improviser be deeply familiar with that particular music’s idiomatic and delimited language of scales, harmonies, melodic gestures, phrase-shapes, structures, and even modes of communication among multiple players. When the different components of that language are extremely well-integrated, the listener may perceive the actual improvised performance as “effortless” and thoroughly spontaneous. The analogy to language is actually quite useful; in order to be fluent and spontaneous in a spoken language, you must also have a working knowledge of the grammar, structure, and idioms of that language, and communication is usually a two-way street (at least.)

There is another aspect of improvisation, however, that I think is often overlooked. To be an effective improviser you have to cultivate a certain level of one-pointed attention and mindfulness. This is true whether you are interacting with other musicians or improvising in a solo context for an extended period of time. That level of one-pointedness is what keeps the player simultaneously engaged with the musical language and all its components, and able to choose from among the myriad elements of that language to create a kind of musical rhetorical discourse with shape and sense, with emotion and expression, with direction and movement and return. It is the lack of that one-pointedness that creates what musicians often refer to as “noodling” – improvisation that just sounds like “random stuff” that doesn’t really go anywhere.

In mantra-based meditation, you focus your mind’s attention on a repeated sound. Ideally, this helps the meditator focus the mind and the attention on one thing, that being the mantra. (Mantras are also believed to have different qualities and benefits; that’s another subject.) Truth be told, most of us are not particularly good at maintaining a one-pointed focus on the mantra; therefore, the mantra becomes a kind of background- constant against which our thoughts do a lot of “noodling.” As we persevere in practicing meditation, we increase the number of times we can get to that “focused” place (although even the most experienced meditators still produce a lot of mental noodling.)

It has occurred to me that improvisation is a rather similar process. For example, if you’re playing medieval music or music from a number of traditional world cultures, you’re holding the sound of the mode and its “final” in your mind (among other things). If you’re playing blues or bebop, in addition to the scale or key you’re also holding a set of idiomatic chord changes; or in the case of bebop, lightning-fast changes and chord substitutions. This is in addition to all that idiomatic language stuff I mentioned before.

It makes sense, then, that if you want to be a good improviser, it might not be a bad idea to place your butt on a cushion and sit some kind of “shamatha” meditation or zazen. It doesn’t really matter whether you use a mantra, or watch your breath, or focus on a visualized object; as long as you keep bringing your mind back to the object of your focus everytime it starts “noodling.” The two processes seem incredibly compatible to me, and it seems to me that for musicians, the one activity cannot but help support the other.