So I've been doing some reading lately. For one thing, it's good for me. It's gotten my brain out of my otherwise sluggish, unmotivated, grieving-over-my-parents'-divorce funk. Turns out I get a huge high from pulling out my old textbooks and blogging about it. My previous post about Monteverdi kept me going all weekend, other than the meltdown I had yesterday afternoon. But life is hard and sometimes, meltdowns happen whether we want them to or not. We're going along, telling ourselves that it's ok and we're doing great and we're going to make it and the next thing you know, well, there you are on the phone with your mother, laying on your front porch, sobbing loud enough for the neighbors to hear and do you care? No, because you're having a meltdown. It happens.
But then you have a glass of wine and watch a movie with your roommate (one that you've seen so many times you can explicate the implicit of an Austen period piece... in the modern) and do some reading and get up the next morning and go for a run and realize that it really is going to be ok. Because God is good and he will not let you fall to the ground when you're doing what he's called you to do. And even when you're not doing what he's called you to do, he's still not going to let you wander outside the scope of his will for your life because whether you realize it or not, your wanderings are in his will for you too...
... which brings me to Bach. Last night's chapter on Bach was kind of earth-shattering for me in a way that totally reminded me of the How I Met Your Mother episode where they all realize each other's annoying habits and, each time one of these is mentioned in front of the group, you literally hear the glass shattering in their heads as they grapple with the enormity of these new realizations about people they've known for a long time. As a pianist, I've known Bach for... a while. But not in the way I came to grips with him last night. You could say I've known his music for a while. But the man himself... well, it turns out he had a veritable stick up his ass. And when you've fallen in love with one side of a person and envisioned them in such a way for so long... inevitably the glass is going to shatter at some point.
And it makes sense that Bach was difficult to work with. His output is enormous. Somebody once told me that if you copied out all of Bach's scores by hand, you couldn't finish them in a lifetime. Whether or not that's true is beyond me. I suppose I could Google search it, but that's not really my point here. Bach was a genius, there's no doubt about it, and geniuses don't always have the best interpersonal skills on the face of the planet. It's why he's easy to fall in love with if you listen to his music and ignore his personal life. His harmonic schemes are not only inventive, but well... divine. Hauntingly beautiful at times. And his counterpoint is beyond reproach, since well, he wrote the book on it. I mean, let's be honest: he had polyphonic compositional techniques down to a science. Literally. Take a look at The Art of Fugue for any period of time, and you'll find your jaw hanging open and your eyebrows crossed in horror / awe. It's enough to give you an inferiority complex as a musician, throw up the white flag of surrender, and consider going into another field. Of course he was a bear to work with... he operated at one of the highest levels of musicianship in the history of western music and he was a perfectionist. His personality, combined with his genius, made it really difficult to be around people who just weren't quite there yet... basically, everyone he knew. With the exception of maybe a few... like Buxtehude and Handel.
And this is where I come to my point: Bach wasn't really competing with anyone. For all of his genius, he was just doing what he knew how to do. He was isolated in Leipzig for most of his career and he was expected to provide music for Sunday service at St. Thomas' and for teaching the boys at the school. My professors in college tried to stress this point often enough, which I failed to fully come to grips with until I was on my run this morning: musicians in the Baroque and Classical periods weren't writing for eternity. They weren't competing with other musicians in their regional areas or even musicians of the past. They were just doing their job.
Prof Schonberg writes,
"Like all composers of the day, [Bach] regarded himiself as a working professional, one who ordinarily wrote to fill a specific need -- a cantata for Sunday, an exercise book for the children, an organ piece to demonstrate a particular instrument. He did publish a very few pieces of which he was especially proud, but by and large he fully expected the bulk of his music to disappear after his death. When he became cantor in Leipzig, he bundled up all his predecessor's music... and he knew that his successor would just as summarily get rid of whatever Bach manuscripts were around. It was a cantor's job to present music that he had composed not the music of another man (39)."
If only we had the same attitude today. Just do what you are called to do in life... whatever that is. If it's pilates, do your pilates. If it's teaching piano, then teach piano. If it's blogging, then blog. If it's cooking, then good grief... get out there and cook tasty food for the people you love. And I'll tell you a secret, for those of you who aren't exactly hip to this idea of calling: we're called to the things that we love and are good at. And maybe those things don't make us any money. So maybe you work at a job you don't really like because it pulls in an income to feed the hungry mouths that depend on you. Or maybe you work part-time at Starbucks so that you can at least have money coming in while you start up your photography business. Whatever it is, make sure you have time to do the things you're called to do. Forget about posterity. Forget about the competition. Real artistry, real creativity happens when you're doing what you love over and over again, getting really good at it over time... til you've nailed it down to a science... til you yourself have written the book on counterpoint. And maybe no one will ever find that book or care that it exists. But you do. And you'll have done something really worthwhile while writing it: lived.
Sources:
- Schonberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers, (Third Edition). pp 36-54. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
- Bays, Thomas, and Lloyd. How I Met Your Mother. Season 3, Episode 8: "Spoiler Alert." Nov 12, 2007, original air date.
Monday, August 29, 2011
TED talks
Watched this TED talks video by Sir Ken Robinson this morning... what a fantastically challenging and encouraging clip. He talks about how our current education system is educating the creativity out of us... a system designed to produce university professors (something I myself know all too well...). And it starts in childhood...
Click HERE to watch.
Click HERE to watch.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
from grounds to gold
This morning I blog to the sound of coffee straining... iced coffee, that is :) My friend Christine recently clued me in to The Pioneer Woman, whose show premiers on Food Network this morning. I sooo wish I could watch it, but starving artist that I am, we don't have cable here at the apartment and Christine is working today. Boo! So I will have to settle for iced coffee bliss and hope that I can find it on the internet later lol...
Things are... busy! And not just a little. This entire week has been one big fat crescendo of busyness. It was just last weekend I was bemoaning the fact that the start of school and lessons again hadn't exactly been the shot of B-12 I was hoping for... apparently I didn't realize the full swing of everything was comin' for me so soon! And most of my students are crazy about what their doing and crazy about their teacher, which makes it fun to teach them ;) I have sooo many beginners and elementary-level students this year. Of my 11 kids, 4 of them are straight up beginning students, either started over the summer or this past week. Then I have 2 kids who've had a year of piano, 4 who I would consider to be in that late elementary phase (combined with being in middle or early high school, this is a fatal combination... but they work as hard as can be expected for being in that awkward phase of life) and one solidly intermediate student. And I'm getting to know them and their families much more deeply, now that I've had a year with most of them... I guess you could say I'm settling in.
And you know, I never thought I'd "settle in" to the life of what Dr. Budds calls "a peripatetic piano teacher," but I am. I always thought I'd go back to grad school in another year or so, which isn't to say that I won't or that it's not a possibility but... for what? (other than the sheer love of learning... ?) I watch my former profs kill themselves year after year, playing the political game to the best of their ability, all to be paid way less than the engineering professors and be put out to pasture in the end... I know that at 25, I'm probably a little overly disillusioned but let's not forget to mention the fact that there are tons of DMAs and PhDs running around out there with their doctorates in music who end up doing exactly what I'm doing or working at Starbucks to pay the interest on their student loans each month because they can't find an open professorship for which they're qualified enough (which, they are... it's just that... well, so is every other applying candidate). It's pretty sick, if you ask me.
So instead I teach my students and pray for them (like my 8-yr-old who has trouble going to sleep each night because she's scared to death of intruders... sound familiar, Mom?) and strain my coffee and work on the first Debussy Arabesque for Halley's wedding music (which, yes, is easier than the music I worked on in college but I love it and it feels good to practice something pretty that I know I can nail) and enjoy the excitement of my students and try to pay down my student loans and buy myself a $5 bouquet of roses to stick my nose into six times a day because they just smell so amazingly beautiful and do so much to make me feel good... because you have to learn to rest. And even more than learning to rest, you have to learn to create patterns of work and rest that are healthy. "Poor and content is rich, and rich enough..." (Shakespeare). I'd say the same holds true for prestige and power, or lack thereof.
The other night I pulled out my old textbooks and started reading again about Monteverdi. Ok granted, it wasn't a textbook that I was reading, but it might as well have been. Anyway, the author describes Monteverdi's life, which in summary looks something like this:
- Monteverdi worked at the court of Mantua.
- He wasn't ever really happy there to start with because they overworked him and paid him nothing (I just don't know anyone in that kind of position!...).
- Then, after all that hard work, his wife dies in 1607.
- Naturally, this tragedy brought about a fury of creativity, resulting in one of the most famous operas in the history of the canon, Orfeo, written a few months later...
- But was that enough for the Mantuan court? Oh no... they wanted more.
- So Monteverdi quits. He leaves Mantua. He takes his children to Cremona to live with his dad. Poor guy just needed a break... and to grieve properly (which also sounds familiar).
- The Duke of Mantua (his former employer) orders Monteverdi back to court on several occasions. But Monteverdi refuses. The pay is terrible and they want him to work (to set lines and write scores) at the speed of well... Bach.
- ... And Monteverdi knew that just wasn't his way. He knew that for most people (Bach excluded), art takes time. And good art takes even more time... time being a combination of patterns of work and rest and living life, since, you know... art is an expression of the human experience.
Which brings me back to my coffee... every week this summer I've been making iced coffee... you know, the recipe given to me by Christine that she found on The Pioneer Woman's blog. It is amazing and delicious and downright phoenomenal. But there's a process to this... gold, for lack of a better word. What you do is you do not brew it hot and then ice it down like any normal idiot would make iced coffee. No, you cold-brew it in bulk, mixing coffee and water together in a big pot and put it in the fridge for eight hours and go live your life until its done brewing. It's a process that takes time... just like art, just like life. What you put in the fridge is going to come out way different in the end. But letting it sit... brew... ferment if you will, is what turns it from grounds and water to well... gold.
So what happened to Monteverdi in the end? Well, this one ends well... St. Mark's hears that he's out of work (available for employment?) and asks him to come be Maestro di capella, which doesn't sound like much if you don't know what it means. St. Mark's in Venice happened to be one of the best churches around during the Renaissance. They had amazing (seemingly unlimited) resources, a fantastic performing space, and more importantly, everyone there had a tremendous respect for Monteverdi as both a musician and a person. So asking him to come be music director was a huge deal. It would be the equivalent of being asked to be music director at Westminster Abbey today. They paid him about four times as much as he made at Mantua by the end of his career and he had full control of both his time and his musical investments, so long as the church work got done. And he never had to beg for his paycheck. If he didn't pick it up, they sent it to his house on the day it was due.
And my story is highly unlikely to end as beautifully as Monteverdi's did, but I read an article the other day that seemed to sum it up really well...
"You have to do what you have to do. You can't go to law school if you don't have any interest in being a lawyer. You can't take a class if taking a class feels like it's going to kill you. Faking it never works. ...
...You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you're going to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts...
You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.
But that's all." (taken from "The Future Has an Ancient Heart," The Rumpus Advice Column #72, www.therumpus.net)
... yes, that's all.
Sources:
- Schoenberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers, (Third Edition). pp. 23-35. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
- Drummond, Ree. "Perfect Iced Coffee," posted Jun 13, 2011. The Pioneer Woman. www.thepioneerwoman.com
- "The Future Has an Ancient Heart," The Rumpus Advice Column #72. The Rumpus Book Club. www.therumpus.net
Things are... busy! And not just a little. This entire week has been one big fat crescendo of busyness. It was just last weekend I was bemoaning the fact that the start of school and lessons again hadn't exactly been the shot of B-12 I was hoping for... apparently I didn't realize the full swing of everything was comin' for me so soon! And most of my students are crazy about what their doing and crazy about their teacher, which makes it fun to teach them ;) I have sooo many beginners and elementary-level students this year. Of my 11 kids, 4 of them are straight up beginning students, either started over the summer or this past week. Then I have 2 kids who've had a year of piano, 4 who I would consider to be in that late elementary phase (combined with being in middle or early high school, this is a fatal combination... but they work as hard as can be expected for being in that awkward phase of life) and one solidly intermediate student. And I'm getting to know them and their families much more deeply, now that I've had a year with most of them... I guess you could say I'm settling in.
And you know, I never thought I'd "settle in" to the life of what Dr. Budds calls "a peripatetic piano teacher," but I am. I always thought I'd go back to grad school in another year or so, which isn't to say that I won't or that it's not a possibility but... for what? (other than the sheer love of learning... ?) I watch my former profs kill themselves year after year, playing the political game to the best of their ability, all to be paid way less than the engineering professors and be put out to pasture in the end... I know that at 25, I'm probably a little overly disillusioned but let's not forget to mention the fact that there are tons of DMAs and PhDs running around out there with their doctorates in music who end up doing exactly what I'm doing or working at Starbucks to pay the interest on their student loans each month because they can't find an open professorship for which they're qualified enough (which, they are... it's just that... well, so is every other applying candidate). It's pretty sick, if you ask me.
So instead I teach my students and pray for them (like my 8-yr-old who has trouble going to sleep each night because she's scared to death of intruders... sound familiar, Mom?) and strain my coffee and work on the first Debussy Arabesque for Halley's wedding music (which, yes, is easier than the music I worked on in college but I love it and it feels good to practice something pretty that I know I can nail) and enjoy the excitement of my students and try to pay down my student loans and buy myself a $5 bouquet of roses to stick my nose into six times a day because they just smell so amazingly beautiful and do so much to make me feel good... because you have to learn to rest. And even more than learning to rest, you have to learn to create patterns of work and rest that are healthy. "Poor and content is rich, and rich enough..." (Shakespeare). I'd say the same holds true for prestige and power, or lack thereof.
The other night I pulled out my old textbooks and started reading again about Monteverdi. Ok granted, it wasn't a textbook that I was reading, but it might as well have been. Anyway, the author describes Monteverdi's life, which in summary looks something like this:
- Monteverdi worked at the court of Mantua.
- He wasn't ever really happy there to start with because they overworked him and paid him nothing (I just don't know anyone in that kind of position!...).
- Then, after all that hard work, his wife dies in 1607.
- Naturally, this tragedy brought about a fury of creativity, resulting in one of the most famous operas in the history of the canon, Orfeo, written a few months later...
- But was that enough for the Mantuan court? Oh no... they wanted more.
- So Monteverdi quits. He leaves Mantua. He takes his children to Cremona to live with his dad. Poor guy just needed a break... and to grieve properly (which also sounds familiar).
- The Duke of Mantua (his former employer) orders Monteverdi back to court on several occasions. But Monteverdi refuses. The pay is terrible and they want him to work (to set lines and write scores) at the speed of well... Bach.
- ... And Monteverdi knew that just wasn't his way. He knew that for most people (Bach excluded), art takes time. And good art takes even more time... time being a combination of patterns of work and rest and living life, since, you know... art is an expression of the human experience.
Which brings me back to my coffee... every week this summer I've been making iced coffee... you know, the recipe given to me by Christine that she found on The Pioneer Woman's blog. It is amazing and delicious and downright phoenomenal. But there's a process to this... gold, for lack of a better word. What you do is you do not brew it hot and then ice it down like any normal idiot would make iced coffee. No, you cold-brew it in bulk, mixing coffee and water together in a big pot and put it in the fridge for eight hours and go live your life until its done brewing. It's a process that takes time... just like art, just like life. What you put in the fridge is going to come out way different in the end. But letting it sit... brew... ferment if you will, is what turns it from grounds and water to well... gold.
So what happened to Monteverdi in the end? Well, this one ends well... St. Mark's hears that he's out of work (available for employment?) and asks him to come be Maestro di capella, which doesn't sound like much if you don't know what it means. St. Mark's in Venice happened to be one of the best churches around during the Renaissance. They had amazing (seemingly unlimited) resources, a fantastic performing space, and more importantly, everyone there had a tremendous respect for Monteverdi as both a musician and a person. So asking him to come be music director was a huge deal. It would be the equivalent of being asked to be music director at Westminster Abbey today. They paid him about four times as much as he made at Mantua by the end of his career and he had full control of both his time and his musical investments, so long as the church work got done. And he never had to beg for his paycheck. If he didn't pick it up, they sent it to his house on the day it was due.
And my story is highly unlikely to end as beautifully as Monteverdi's did, but I read an article the other day that seemed to sum it up really well...
"You have to do what you have to do. You can't go to law school if you don't have any interest in being a lawyer. You can't take a class if taking a class feels like it's going to kill you. Faking it never works. ...
...You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you're going to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts...
You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth.
But that's all." (taken from "The Future Has an Ancient Heart," The Rumpus Advice Column #72, www.therumpus.net)
... yes, that's all.
Sources:
- Schoenberg, Harold C. The Lives of the Great Composers, (Third Edition). pp. 23-35. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
- Drummond, Ree. "Perfect Iced Coffee," posted Jun 13, 2011. The Pioneer Woman. www.thepioneerwoman.com
- "The Future Has an Ancient Heart," The Rumpus Advice Column #72. The Rumpus Book Club. www.therumpus.net
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
the future has an ancient heart
My friend Savannah recently posted a link to a blog on her facebook page... I literally wept reading it, I needed to hear the words in that post so badly.
There's a link to it below... you'll have to excuse its language. Just to warn, it's not pretty. If you're not one for bad language, I'd stay away. But if you can get past it, then you'll find what I did: words that I need to hear every day of my life... grace for the journey, that is.
To access the blog, click here: the future has an ancient heart
There's a link to it below... you'll have to excuse its language. Just to warn, it's not pretty. If you're not one for bad language, I'd stay away. But if you can get past it, then you'll find what I did: words that I need to hear every day of my life... grace for the journey, that is.
To access the blog, click here: the future has an ancient heart
Friday, August 5, 2011
rain
It's raining. Finally. It hasn't rained (like seriously rained) in at least three weeks. We so needed this. St. Louis has been a hot, humid sauna for the last half of June and the better part of July. Don't ask me how it's been so humid, even when there's been no precipitation. It's just the load we come with as a city. Rain or no rain, it's humid all. the. time.
But today, there's relief. And it smells divine.
I'm sitting on my screened-in porch with the screens open of course, enjoying the cooler temps, the cloudy skies, the steady downpour, and the mist floating in alongside a glass of iced coffee. Pure bliss.
And it makes me think about rain... metaphorically, of course.
"When it rains, it pours...," a saying that alludes to good times. We haven't had good times recently. As a city, we've been in drought. As a country, we are economically dry right now. And me? Well, it's been a hard summer. Dry economically just like everyone else and emotional, to put it lightly... just like the St. Louis weather -- hot and humid. But the rain gives me hope... like the long-awaited release of something you've been patiently hoping for.
It makes me think back to other seasons in my life when it rained all the time and drove me insane. I remember the monsoons that inevitably hit the campus of the University of Missouri at the most inopportune times. I'm positive there was a semester it rained every time I walked across campus from art history to Dr. Minturn's Rhythmic Analysis class. Every. single. time. And I think it continued the following fall when walking from German to 20th Century Music Theory. For like 8 weeks straight, it rained every Tuesday and Thursday. I got so sick of having shoes and jeans that were sopping wet, soaked through all the way to the sock. Not to mention wet textbooks, scores, and homework... times when it rained so much, I might as well have dumped my coffee inside my backpack.
And now, I couldn't be happier for it.
It reminds me of times in life when there's so much rain... too much rain. Too much to do, too much on your plate, too much to handle, too many things clamoring for your attention. You grow weary of being poured on every time you turn around... you no longer appreciate the rain and it becomes a burden to you instead. And then there are times like now when you long for nothing more than a midday shower.
I can't wait for the teaching semester to start, to see my students and their families again, to accompany on a regular basis at Lutheran High. The lack of diversion lately has really forced me to focus on the issues at hand and I can't wait for my sabbatical (which is quickly becoming less like a sabbatical and more like unemployment) to terminate in the beginning of the fall semester. Things have been so out of whack lately. But I guess that's how life is sometimes...
It's just ironic to think about, that's all... but today the rain is far from being a burden. Today it gives me hope.
But today, there's relief. And it smells divine.
I'm sitting on my screened-in porch with the screens open of course, enjoying the cooler temps, the cloudy skies, the steady downpour, and the mist floating in alongside a glass of iced coffee. Pure bliss.
And it makes me think about rain... metaphorically, of course.
"When it rains, it pours...," a saying that alludes to good times. We haven't had good times recently. As a city, we've been in drought. As a country, we are economically dry right now. And me? Well, it's been a hard summer. Dry economically just like everyone else and emotional, to put it lightly... just like the St. Louis weather -- hot and humid. But the rain gives me hope... like the long-awaited release of something you've been patiently hoping for.
It makes me think back to other seasons in my life when it rained all the time and drove me insane. I remember the monsoons that inevitably hit the campus of the University of Missouri at the most inopportune times. I'm positive there was a semester it rained every time I walked across campus from art history to Dr. Minturn's Rhythmic Analysis class. Every. single. time. And I think it continued the following fall when walking from German to 20th Century Music Theory. For like 8 weeks straight, it rained every Tuesday and Thursday. I got so sick of having shoes and jeans that were sopping wet, soaked through all the way to the sock. Not to mention wet textbooks, scores, and homework... times when it rained so much, I might as well have dumped my coffee inside my backpack.
And now, I couldn't be happier for it.
It reminds me of times in life when there's so much rain... too much rain. Too much to do, too much on your plate, too much to handle, too many things clamoring for your attention. You grow weary of being poured on every time you turn around... you no longer appreciate the rain and it becomes a burden to you instead. And then there are times like now when you long for nothing more than a midday shower.
I can't wait for the teaching semester to start, to see my students and their families again, to accompany on a regular basis at Lutheran High. The lack of diversion lately has really forced me to focus on the issues at hand and I can't wait for my sabbatical (which is quickly becoming less like a sabbatical and more like unemployment) to terminate in the beginning of the fall semester. Things have been so out of whack lately. But I guess that's how life is sometimes...
It's just ironic to think about, that's all... but today the rain is far from being a burden. Today it gives me hope.
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