I’m Back…

Long ago, in a more innocent time, I wrote a post about the potential for procrastination to feed our creativity. I was writing then, as well, to let my readers know, after more than 150 posts, that I was going to take a break and work on some other writing projects. I wrote that final post on February 27, 2020.

As we know, these seven months later, a lot changed immediately after I wrote at the end of February. A lot. I was then coming off of four very intense years of working in eight different churches as an interim music director. I had not had a Sunday off in more than 2-1/2 years and I planned to take February through August off from working in churches and concentrate on writing a book that I thought might be in me. I also had two other part-time jobs, I was going to be taking a choir to sing at St. David’s Cathedral in Wales, and had some concerts planned with my duo partners.

I did not need a pandemic to shut down the entire country in order to find the necessary discipline to work on a book. Thank you, but it wasn’t necessary to be forced to stay home and have all of my freelance work dry up. We can go back to normal now. Really.

My light-heartedness is really only a cover for all the sadness that I feel for those in our world who are suffering so much loss – of health, loved ones, income, seeing family, travel plans, confidence in our government, optimism for the future, all those celebrations of life and death that need us to gather in person…there is such heaviness in feeling loss all around us.

And in the face of loss, we have to look for cracks where the light can come through. There is no choice except to find joy where we can.

I did indeed work on a book. It is a memoir, something of a hybrid that combines memory, reflection, and observation. I have sent my manuscript out to readers who have helped me further shape my thoughts, and its currently out in search of an agent. That seems crazy, but we’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, I also got caught up with the music of a composer from early 20th century France. Her name is Mel Bonis, and I was really taken with some of her piano music which has been gathered under the title Femmes de Legende. I ended up writing (very) short stories to go with these seven pieces, and putting together an audiobook, which is supposed to come out on Audible one of these days. In order to do that, I also needed to create an actual book, which is essentially my script for the audiobook. I intended to wait until it was available on Audible before sharing it with anyone, but that process is taking longer than I have patience for, so here is the first chapter and a link to the book. Let me know what you think. If nothing else, I learned a lot and had a great time working on this.

Difficult Women…Legends Revised (book)

Chapter 1 (audio)

We have no choice except to find joy where we can, and we also have no choice except to be creative in these strange times. What I see are people cooking more than ever, gardening more bountifully, staying in touch with friends and family more lovingly, talking to their neighbors more often, and finding new hobbies. In my neighborhood, families are out walking together all the time, the sidewalk chalk art is more prolific, and the birds seem to be singing more beautifully too. Maybe that last one is just my imagination, but I’m paying attention to things I hadn’t before, and I’m finding all kinds of light coming through the cracks.

I hope you are too.

Have you voted yet? (speaking of cracks, and much-needed light).

Sonya

Death and Taxes and Procrastination

A podcast I listened to recently considered the ways that procrastination benefited creative thought.  I might have called it “marinating” instead, but the process is the same.  Flickering ideas come and go, never quite landing, but somehow manage to grow in scope during these periods of procrastination.

As I said, procrastination works well for creative problem-solving.  Not a good idea for your taxes, unless you plan to get creative with those, and impossible with death of course. One of the things I had procrastinated on was writing a post about planning your funeral. Following the death of my well-loved 95 year old father-in-law, that seemed like a great idea, but it never jelled. You should go ahead and plan it anyway though!

I’ve enjoyed the discipline of writing for a blog (nearly) every week for the past 12 years,  but am feeling a need to step away for a while. Not from writing, just from this format.  People in different parts of my life keep telling me to write a book, and while a book might not emerge, I have most definitely procrastinated taking this idea seriously and am hereby committing to write with more intention, if perhaps less purpose. The other night I awoke from a dream that was telling me something important, and for the first time I took the leap of writing down an idea that was percolating up from deep within during the middle of the night. My beautiful blue suede-covered journal stays nearer to me these days, and what looks like nonsense on the page at the moment just might be transfigured.

We’ll see what comes of it, but I’m giving myself six months to explore things that might have been marinating for years now.

Here are some of the things that have been feeding my imagination these days:

Upcoming concerts:

• Sunday, March 1 at 2:30 – a program with Furia Flamenco.  Very fun!
• Saturday, March 7 at 7:00 – a house concert with Karin Kelleher playing sonatas for piano and violin by Grieg and Beethoven, raising money for Manna Food Bank.  Contact me if you are interested in attending. (and another one on April 18)
• Tuesday, March 24 at 12:10 – bassoonist Cindy Gady and I are putting together a program of meditative music to accompany walking the labyrinth at Church of the Epiphany. Read more.
• Not a concert, but a chance to make music with a wonderful group of singers in residence at St. David’s Cathedral in Wales during August

And books…so many great books are part of my life.  At the moment I have three books in rotation:  a second reading of The Overstory by Richard Powers, listening to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and then this week I had to add Philip Kennicott’s new memoir, Counterpoint, after hearing him speak about it. His book explores family, playing the piano, Bach and The Goldberg Variations. Except for the abusive mother part, it’s the book I would have so wished I could write.

There is much that is ugly about our world right now, and while that has probably always been true, the ugliness seems more pervasive, more oppressive than I can remember. What Vuong manages to do in his extended letter to his mother – which reads more as a poem – is to see beauty in between and around all the pain he experiences.  I don’t know if being able to describe the sordid, heartbreaking parts of life with such glorious waves of prose worthy of someone named Ocean works to deny what should be harrowing to read, but the books and music and people I turn to again and again are not an escape into beauty, but rather have clarifying and redemptive powers for me as I wade through all those thoughts that I’ve procrastinated writing about.  After I get our taxes done, and before I die.

Check in with me in six months and we’ll see if creativity does indeed emerge from procrastination.  Until then, peace, my friends.

Seven

I am preparing a choral piece, new to me and to the choir I’m working with for a few months, and as so often happens, my free-associating mind began with a question that led me to a host of unexpected places. Jonathan Dove’s 1995 work, Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars is as mysterious and gorgeous as the night sky. The music alone is enough for me, but I had to ponder the text. Seven stars? The question asked, and I was abruptly dropping down Alice’s rabbit hole, going past all kinds of strange sights associated with the number seven.

It began innocently enough with a quick search of the Pleiades, the seven stars that represent messengers of God in the second chapter of the Bible’s Book of Revelations, and the inspiration for part of Dove’s text. Suddenly my brain was careening past Joseph’s seven years of famine and seven years of plenty, the seven joys of Mary and the seven last words of Jesus, baseball’s seventh inning stretch, marriage’s seven year itch, and the seven colors of the rainbow (remember Roy G. Biv?). Seven days of creation, and seven musical pitches in western music – do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. But wait, there are also seven pitches in the scales of Indian classical music: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni SA. Seven chakras in Hinduism’s Vedic texts to guide our bodies’ spiritual, physical and emotional health. Seven years to regenerate every cell in the human body. Seven deadly sins, seven gifts of the spirit.

I was feeling quite dizzy at this point.

Alice’s rabbit hole seemed to end, and I found myself where I had begun. The seven stars known as Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, and Dove’s beautiful piece:

But then I slipped just a bit further, remembering that the one group of stars nearly everyone can identify is the Big Dipper, outlined – do I need to say it? – by seven stars, including Polaris, the North Star.  Follow the Drinking Gourd, a spiritual which gave coded directions to escaping slaves, pointed the way north with its advice to follow that dipper/gourd to freedom. That is the power of seven.

Apparently my trip down this rabbit hole wasn’t quite finished yet. I came upon an a cappella group that is new to me called Naturally 7, and they too demonstrate the power of seven, with their voices creating an orchestra of sounds, and a message in this particular song that still needs to be heard about tearing down walls and finding another kind of freedom.

Seven, a prime number which represents the unity of 1 and the diversity of 7, indivisible by anything else. Seven lamps on the menorah, our weeks made complete by seven sunrises and sunsets, seven stars to guide us on our way.

If you’re interested, the choir of Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church in Bethesda, Maryland will be singing Dove’s piece during their 10:30 am service on February 2.

it was terribly cold

That’s the title of one movement from David Lang’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical work, the little match girl passion, which will be performed next Tuesday by The Bridge Ensemble on Church of the Epiphany’s noontime concert series. All are welcome and it’s free, but don’t expect to leave emotionally unspent.

The lower case letters are the composer’s and, in fact, a 2017 New York Times article asked in its title: where have classical music’s uppercase letters gone?  My favorite line, by the way, is the first sentence of the second paragraph: “But composers who channel their inner E.E. Cummings…”  Very funny.

Lang explains that he began using lowercase titles as a student, too full of self-doubt and too sure that “classical music is about nobility, about things with capital letters that are big marble busts on pedestals.” He didn’t feel worthy of writing in capital letters – that was for Beethoven, in his mind – but he also saw an intimacy and an invitation to experience his music from the inside by using lowercase titles.

Lang does more than break stylistic rules for the written word. He breaks through the Christian narrative of suffering, taking Jesus out of the story and putting in a character from Hans Christian Anderson’s story. The little match girl passion not only invites us in, but breaks our hearts too. That’s what happens when you allow yourself to witness suffering from the inside.

It was terribly cold outside, and the girl’s cruel father sends her out to sell matches. Her futile efforts lead her to seek refuge under a Christmas tree, and she lights her matches and sees vision of her grandmother, the only person who was ever kind to her. As in Christianity’s passion narrative, she is derided by strangers and left to die. The composer summed up the story’s message, and his work’s appeal across sacred/secular lines: the “message is pretty simple: you need to pay attention to the suffering of people around you.”

The music is at once archaic and universal, the story juxtaposes the horror of her reality and the beauty of her hopeful visions. You are invited in to witness these things in the performance, and to contribute as you’re able to The Welcome Table ministry of feeding the homeless which is sponsored by Church of the Epiphany. It is perhaps one small way to pay attention to the suffering of those right around us.

Tuesday, January 28 at 12:10 pm
Church of the Epiphany, 1317 G Street, NW  (Metro Center)

The Dark Past

This is the weekend to revisit, with greater understanding and appreciation, one of our country’s finest – and darkest – moments. The Civil Rights movement shaped most of the mid-20^th century and has more recently expanded in scope to include differences of sexuality, physical abilities and ethnicities. Standing up to injustice by sitting down at lunch counters…naming systemic inequalities by making those on the winning side of the imbalances uncomfortable…choosing love over hate…when does the work of seeing what is wrong in order to make it right end?

In recognition of the powerful work of reconciliation effected by Dr. Martin Luther King, that great hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing will undoubtedly be sung by millions of voices around the country this weekend.  It was first performed in 1900 as a poem read during a celebration of Lincoln’s birthday in a program at a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, an event at which Booker T. Washington was the honored guest that day.  Imagine the power of these words on the ears and hearts of people just 35 years from slavery.

Lift every voice and sing, ‘Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on ’til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,  Bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past, Til now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
 
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, May we forever stand,
True to our God, True to our native land.

There are A LOT of recordings of this song on YouTube, and I spent more time than I should to find just the right one.  I didn’t want a soloist, or something glossy and over-produced. I didn’t want it to be sung by a highly skilled Gospel choir or a staid, perfectly in-tune, yet soulless, choir.  This is a hymn for all people.  True story – I memorized this hymn and we sang it as my husband and I walked down the aisle at the end of our wedding in 1999. A hymn for all people, and all occasions!

There is one line that I ponder each time I play this hymn though, the final line True to our native land.  What is our native land?  Were African-Americans in 1900 thinking about some part of Africa?  About the United States, where everyone in that first audience was mostly likely born?  Or could we claim this song for everyone by thinking about our native land as that heavenly land where we are loved regardless of skin color or political beliefs or “differences” of any kind?  Perhaps a native land where reconciliation is not just a goal, but already complete.

I am reading a biography of Harriet Tubman these days. Her story refuses to allow us to see slavery as anything other than the cruelest institution, one that was damaging in different ways to people of every skin color. If an audience just 35 years away from that dark past can sing about facing a rising sun and marching until victory is won, then we are obligated today to continue rising, continue marching, continue standing, true to what is right, because the past has followed us and demands to be examined.

20/20 Vision

I was heartened to read in the December 3, 2019 edition of The Washington Post that the world isn’t actually as terrible as we all seem to believe.  The editorialist looked at the many ways that people are actually better off now than they have been before. Starvation-level poverty reduced by 80% since 1970, massive gains in disease prevention,and billions of people living with the freedoms that democracy promises and more prosperous than ever before.  Read it for yourself: The world is doing much better than the bad news makes us think.  And don’t we all need some good news? ¹

I could have looked at a dozen (or more) other places in the same newspaper to find articles which point to a very different interpretation of current life,  with stories about gun violence, environmental degradation, and evidence of racism and hatred  and corruption of every kind. Which version of the world is true? ²

It comes down to a choice of living with hope, or living with hopelessness. The first suggests we avert our gaze from the bleak realities all around us and the second is just, well, depressing. If the goal is to do something, however small, to make the world better, than which of these attitudes – hopefulness or hopelessness – will spur us to action? It’s well-known that depression causes inaction, an inability to move forward or cope with life’s challenges. So that leaves hopefulness, but what to do with this chosen hope? ³

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
(from an essay by Wendall Berry, Poetry and Marriage)

I have this idea that poems, like art, can’t be sought after.  They seem come into my life when I’m not looking. Berry’s words above aren’t a poem exactly, but they did come unbidden into my life at just the right time several years ago, read by a yoga instructor at the end of class. They give us permission to live comfortably in bafflement, to accept uncertainty, to find hope, and maybe even joy, in those things which block us from the easy paths we think we want.

The year ahead promises all of those – bafflement, uncertainty, and hope too. It is Berry’s last line which makes me smile though. High on my list of favorite sounds is water moving through a rocky creek, but I had never thought about the creek’s music coming from the stony impediments along its path. Perhaps your 20/20 vision will see more clearly through the looming 2020 clouds if you sing more. It’s worth a try.

¹ Yes
² Both
³ I don’t know, but singing will help

Another Lesson from Beethoven

Has anyone ever asked you to do something that is just simply impossible? Let’s fly to the moon kind of impossible? Do you greet that request with a wondering attitude – how could I help make this happen?  Or an immediate reality check – are you crazy?  

Beethoven asks the impossible of pianists with some frequency.  The piano is a percussion instrument – a hammer inside the piano strikes a group of strings which vibrate as long as the dampers are held off the strings by the pedal. Without benefit of a violinist’s bow or an oboist’s breath, once a note is played on the piano, it’s done. Decay is the only option. Or is it?

Beethoven regularly puts a crescendo sign on a held note or chord – and that is simply impossible to do on the piano. Hmm, how can we make this happen?  One of my teachers years ago suggested that I should hear the note getting louder in my head and by some form of alchemy the crescendo would be communicated to the listener. That works for me. Perhaps there is an element of body language or a long drawn breath that keeps the player involved with the note in a way that at least suggests it is growing in sound and connecting to whatever follows. Sometimes Beethoven even marks a crescendo and a decrescendo on the same note or chord. Okay, that really is just crazy. Or is it?

I find it best to do as Beethoven commands, or to at least attempt the impossible. Paying attention to the little markings in his music is the way in to his genius. Think of all the things we believe in, but can’t see – love, the mind, friendship, atoms, intuition. Beethoven helps me believe in a crescendo that can’t really exist, and that’s a beautiful first step into a world where all things are possible.

 

 

More Lessons from Beethoven

True to form, I am out of synch with the rest of the world. Musicians are gearing up for a major Beethoven celebration in 2020, the 250th anniversary of his birth, so plan on hearing a lot of Beethoven’s music next year. Meanwhile, here I am – a step ahead, or just out of step? I think Beethoven would approve.

Alongside the “Archduke” Trio, which I wrote about last week, I am also getting reacquainted with Beethoven’s “Waldstein” sonata, the Piano Sonata Op. 53, a very popular work from the middle years of his creative output which I haven’t played in  40 years or so! Like the “Archduke” Trio, Beethoven has dedicated this music to a nobleman, Count von Waldstein. Beethoven so wanted to be a “von” – i.e. a member of the nobility, but a single letter doomed him to be a humble Dutch “van” without any hint of noble blood. We have that in common at least.

The “Waldstein” Sonata is part of a program that I am playing for my mother and the other residents of her retirement community. It’s a small gift I can give to the person who gave me a life of music by filling our home with the music she loved – everything from Harry Belafonte to the Mamas and Papas to Mozart. She got to choose anything she wanted for my program…and the Beethoven Sonata is joined by music of Philip Glass, and a piece by Albeniz that really should be on the guitar instead of the piano, and a sweet little piece that she loves more than anything, “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” that is supposedly from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, with a little Chopin and Liszt thrown in for good measure. My mother has dementia, and her world seems to be shrinking more each time I see her, but music keeps us connected, at least in the moment.

Beethoven performed as a pianist for the last time when he played the premiere of his “Archduke” Trio in 1814. I wonder if he knew then that it would be his final concert as a pianist.  How often do we do something with the knowledge that it is the last time? There are happy finalities – like making a last mortgage payment – but mostly I think we would be pretty sad to know we are having a final experience of something integral to our lives. When will it be the last time that my mom knows who I am?

As Beethoven’s deafness worsened, it may have appeared that his world got smaller and smaller, but in that isolated universe he went on to create great expanses of music which pushed the boundaries of tonality and form. It wasn’t a limited experience at all inside his head, it would seem.  Even as I am shut out of the life I shared with my mother, perhaps there is a richness of sounds and experiences inside her isolated world that are unknown by those on the outside. I hope so.

I learn a lot about myself when I play Beethoven. He wears his heart, and his frustration, on his sleeve – or so it seems when I hear his music. Expressing emotions in creatively productive ways is certainly one lesson to be gained. And too, his music seems to contain everything that the beautiful reading from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes teaches us about the span of a lifetime. That there is a time to be sad and a time to be joyful. A time to be serious and another to be silly. Times to be in control of our feelings and others when we should be unabashedly exuberant. Times to sing and times to be silent, times to dance and times to be still.

 

Lessons from Beethoven

There’s always a place – a few notes or measures – in any piece I’ve encountered by Beethoven that is just impossible.  Beethoven’s music is always difficult to play well, but hard work usually pays off and something musical emerges, with his abrupt mood swings propelling the music at every turn. Except for that one spot…sometimes the fingers find all the right keys, and sometimes they don’t, and no amount of practice guarantees success 100% of the time.  That’s just how it is, for me anyway.

Beethoven came raging – he never ambles – back into my life a few weeks ago with two works that I needed to learn for two different concerts. First up, his so-called “Archduke” Trio, Op. 97. Piano, violin, and cello open the first movement with quiet grace and charm, but there it is, just a little over one minute in – the spot. The one I practice and practice without guarantee that it will go well in performance. I’ll work hard, drill into the spot’s difficulties with slow practice and careful attention to fingering….and in the moment will just hope for the stars to align!

Perfection is all around us. Images and sounds are manipulated in the studio to create ideal versions of beauty and performances free of any mistakes. Maybe perfection is a worthy goal, I don’t know. But the drama of Beethoven’s music, with its interruptions and conflicts and surprises, requires a different approach in my opinion. One that is unhampered by perfection, accepting of messiness, that leans in to the surprises and embraces the interruptions, all the while wrestling with the conflicts.

Those are goals worth pursuing, musically and in every other part of our lives, don’t you think?

Join me and my musical partners for our performance of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio on Tuesday, November 19 at 12:10 pm at Church of the Epiphany’s Tuesday Concert Series.  TCS concert flyer

Failure of Imagination

We know there are many different kinds of intelligence – interpersonal, musical, logical…but let’s be honest, when we think of someone as smart we usually really only mean intellectually intelligent. Someone who is good with math or words, certified by college degrees and professional success.

I’ve written before about my fascination with Michael Pollan’s book, Botany of Desire, and the intelligence he ascribes to plant life. In the same way, a 2016 book by Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees, studies the ways that trees communicate with, and even express empathy for, other trees. It’s so easy to scoff at the notion of intelligence in plant life,  but we only know what we know. What about all the things we don’t know…all that lies behind, beneath, and around what we perceive through our senses? Couldn’t any plant or animal life have forms of intelligence that we are unable to recognize or define?

I manage a concert series in downtown Washington DC (check out the link if you’re interested), and this past week I branched out a bit from the usual fare of chamber music, with a local dance ensemble, Word Dance Theater, which specializes in the work of Isadora Duncan.  I don’t know a lot about modern dance in general or Duncan in particular, but I’ve seen their work before and knew it expresses an integrity and passion for Duncan’s legacy which would be beautiful in the performance space, and which I hoped would communicate…well, something… to the audience.

Their performance was indeed colorful and thoughtful, and to me expressed uninhibited freedom. It made me think about how much more we should all be moving – gracefully and freely – throughout our days. As I watched, I thought about all the ways people get stuck – physically, emotionally, spiritually –  and wished we could learn to move with Duncan’s freedom to help us get unstuck.

Afterwards, someone I know to have considerable musical and intellectual gifts came up to me, and admitted he didn’t know enough about this kind of dance to see much of anything actually going on.  He wasn’t being judgmental, just perplexed and perhaps a bit bored by what he had seen. I would have wished for him to see something behind or around the dancers’ flowing garments and limbs, but art is unpredictable in its effect at any given time on any particular person.

I do think the gamut of intelligence includes an acceptance of what we don’t know, but what we might imagine to be possible, whether that is the possibility of messages traveling from one tree to another through a complex web of roots, or a dancer’s invitation to move with a freedom that helps to open our minds to what we cannot put into words or even fully understand. To say that something outside of human experience is impossible or ridiculous becomes, for me, simply a failure of imagination.