Newberry Organ dedication

This weekend was cold and rainy: a fortunate happenstance for the gardener, because I was occupied in the festivities surrounding the dedication of Richards, Fowkes & Company’s Opus XIX in the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, right across the parking lot from work. The Newberry Organ (named after the grandparents of the principal donor, who was not just the donor of the principal rank) is a Baroque-style instrument in 5th-comma meantone at A415. My particular part in this was as a sackbut player in works by Schütz (Alleluja! Lobet den Herren) and Gabrieli (Omnes gentes plaudite).

My first task in taking this was to find a way out of my duties at Mary Queen of Peace, since singers are easier to come by than sackbutteers. Indeed, I only really know 3 in town, including myself, and we were all on duty (there are a couple trombonists I know who have played sackbut, but have no experience doing so at A415). I felt obligated to play, and Jonathan Moyer, music director at Covenant, made it worth my while. So I found a sub; I’ve not yet heard how that worked. And I found face, as I’ve been playing brass very little.

We met Friday night for an instrumental rehearsal.. “we” being a Most Excellent Crew. There were Peter Bennett, James David Cristie and Webb Wiggins on organs, Julie Andrijeski and a band of mostly present and former Case grad students on bowed strings, Covenant’s carilloneur George Leggiero on recorder, and me mates David Betts and Paul Furguson. on sackbuts. And, oh yeah, checks sitting on the stands. When I got my instrument, back in 1981 or so, I got a low pitch crook, but the other guys were reading everything down a half step. We didn’t have a bass sackbut, so I played the bass on tenor, transposing up the octave as needed. Paul plays alto, which was OK for the Schütz (which still could have been played on tenor) but problematic for the Gabrieli. Still the guys rose to the challenge magnificently. The only problem encountered was that one of the organs had a transposing keyboard and had been tuned at A440 (which meant that at A415 it was wretchedly out of tune). That got fixed easily enough afterwards. There were 4 organs in the church for this: borrowed chamber organs on either side, the Newberry in back, and the main one in front. It suggests a performance of Steve Reich’s eponymous piece, though 4 acoustic organs, 3 in meantone and one in equal temperament, would be quite inauthentic performance practice for that work (though it might be less irritating that way.). 4 organs in one church! I saw this as an act of expiation and reparation for all the organs that Calvinists trashed during the Reformation. And if you think that’s just Popish snark, the Catholics have a near-equal need to atone for the organs trashed in the wake of Vatican II.

Saturday morning I had to come into town again for the tutti rehearsal, which was kind of a meeting of old buds (Lynn Glickson, composer Jenny Conner) and folks I see every day in the Case library. The chief problem to be handled was to use eyes rather than ears in keeping together (as there were always 2 choirs separated). I’d done this to an extreme over the Internet, about a decade ago, and this was easier but still not easy. And there was the challenge of intonation (NONE of the partials on this instrument are in tune with each other; the higher you go in the low register, the farther the slide has to come out, which is counterintuitive.) Afterwards, I got lunch at Udupi Cafe (south Indian buffet), tried to do some shopping, tried to go to Mass but I got there way early and was feeling poorly, so I ditched my idea of going to a MQoP Schola member’s graduate recital, and went home to early bed, as I had to be out the door at 7.

Call at 8:45, ran through the big pieces, then sat back to hear the pregame show with strings and organ. I was listening to Castello and the Gabrieli Sonata a tre, thinking “This can’t be church music. Church music sucks, and this is 100% suck-free.” The choir did Byrd’s Sing Joyfully, and we did our big pieces without any great flaw (there are always little things that could have been better). The only problem was in the last hymn. In the bulletin, it was in A. We’d been given another hymn, with a different number and name and slightly different words, but the same tine, in Bb. But we hadn’t been told “play the Bb version”. So we came in, a half-step below the organ. I took out the crook (I might better have transposed), the other guys stopped their transposition games, and all was relatively presentable…and the organ drowned it all out anyway.

Well, then I still had to go to Mass. I shot in to the Mac, ran into Fred, who thought I should sing. So, just in case the morning hadn’t been exciting enough, I sight-read a Latin mass, singing tenor, and reading tiny notes for the Ordinary. I was in good voice and had somebody else on the part, so it went fairly well (less so where the notes were tiny).

Back to Covenant, do the 2 pieces again, listen to the organ recital. The new organ sounds wonderful. When’s the Hauptwerk sample set coming out? I want to take it home. I thought the morning had gone slightly better overall. Reception afterwards. I saw Carolyn Peskin, local recorder maven. for the first time in years, and by the looks of things it may well be the last time. I wanted to talk, but I’d spoke to a stranger who wouldn’t let me go (“…and I’m a Aspie.” “I never would have guessed.”) and she disappeared.

So, a lovely time was had by all. I think I’m going to try to put some work into sackbut solo and try to do something.

Bill Ayers pollutes my county

Apparently a terrorist visited the embarrassing part of Portage County on Saturday, and said embarrassingly stupid things to the hippies. Apparently Sheriff Doak couldn’t find probable cause to arrest him. I didn’t know about it, which was a good thing, as I don’t have time to do what needs done this week anyway.

In reply to his comments:
1. Two wrongs don’t make a right. “what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed.”

2. You only committed property damage through incompetence. Your buds blew themselves up making a nail bomb (not an anti-property weapon) to use at a soldier’s dance (how, to blow up the venue before anyone arrived?) The difference between your girlfriend and the Blew Brothers was that the Tsarnaevs got better training.

3. All indications are that there was nothing nihilistic about the Tsarnaevs; they believed passionately in a cause. Indeed, the label fits the Weathermen better.

4. “How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship at all.” Better analogy: Boston is to your bomb as Sandy Hook is to the Peter B. Lewis shooting, which was not a mass murder only because Biswanath Halder bought cheap guns.

Mr. Ayers, I hope you find Jesus and repent of your youthful sins. Otherwise, you can (and will) go straight to Hell. In the meantime, shut up.

Agitprop song in the 21st c. Midwest

I was dismayed when a friend posted a video of my cher maitre William Bolcom on Facebook.

Then in the ensuing conversation, I was alerted to this:

which is apparently only half (!) of a longer ditty available on itunes, where, oddly, it gets rave reviews.

I’m going to dispatch the Rindfleisch first.If I were going to write a parody of a professor of composition writing a pop-ish song against conservatives, it would sound exactly like this. It’s self-parodying. It follows in the footsteps of another liberal academic singer-pianist, Tom Lehrer. But Lehrer had true wit, a deftness with language, and specific sacred cows to slay (as opposed to writing a song against, oh, half the country). Since he was a mathematician first instead of a composer, he knew that facts were facts, that reality was not a matter of whim. And the purely musical values of Lehrer’s products far outclass this work; it’s as if Rindfleisch isn’t even trying. He’s relying on his audience to consider their moral preening as fit recompense for the time spent listening, and that’s thin gruel artistically. It might work at a party, where everyone is drunk on Belgian Tripels and are your friends anyway; notsomuch on the iPod in your car.

As for the text, judging by the YouTube version (What? You want me to pay a buck to be insulted for 8 minutes?), it’s basically a list of alleged hates and loves of conservatives. It’s as if Rindfleisch lined up row upon row of strawmen in front of a trench and mechanically mowed them down with a machine gun, Nazi-style. To refute his generalizations would be a waste of time; the song is not about policy, but about how our guys are cool and your guys are not. It doesn’t even function as Alinskyan ridicule; to do so, it would have to say something unexpected, accurate, and funny about conservatives, and it fails at all three.

Bolcom’s song is dedicated to Woody Guthrie, and more-or-less written in his style. Unlike the Rindfleisch, it is dedicated to a particular specific policy position: victim disarmament. I say “dedicated to” rather than “argues for”, because it’s not an argument; it’s an imprecation against the Senators who chose not to vote for cloture, for “giving up this way / to the bullies of the NRA”. “The country screams and sobs / all you can think of is your jobs” . “how can we vote for you conscienceless men / when you’ve sold us out yet again”. If the Senators who voted no were indeed thinking of their jobs, it was because they were representing the people in their states, who didn’t “scream and sob” for the same things that Bolcom did. Or do the “bullies of the NRA” (i.e., the organization I won’t join because they are the pusillanimous self-serving compromising Vichy regime of gun control) spend their magical money, which somehow seeps into Diebold machines and turns the votes all red, while the money of Bloomberg and Soros is perfectly inert? In any case, it’s not a cogent position; it’s the yawp of a cranky old man. Now, I understand cranky old men, being one, and Bill has better cranky old man cred than I do (he’s just old enough to be my father, if he’d knocked up my mother in high school, which wouldn’t have happened because she was a senior when he was a freshman). But to see a revered master (well, revered by me, anyway) stoop so low as to bang out tonics and dominants beneath 4th-rate poetry, well, that just hurts. OK, it’s not contemporary music; as we said at the University of Michigan, it’s temporary music, as played by the Temporary Directions Ensemble. It’s a jeu d’esprit… but jeux d’esprit are best left to the young.

It might make sense though to situate these works in the tradition of political music. Looking at the classics of the repertoire, the IWW Little Red Book, The Internationale, Woody Guthrie, the union organizing songs of the 30s, one can draw some generalizations.  One is that they are by-and-large positive in tone. They advocate for a specific condition or course of action. They are not personal in tone; if the oppressor is described or addressed, it is in terms of oppressive actions, not as a target of character assassination. Even the most biting and memorable lines are more about actions than people. For example, in Joe Hill’s Preacher and the Slave, the Salvation Army are not bad people, they just have an inconsistent sense of social justice, and offer “pie in the sky” instead of pie here on earth. In his Casey Jones, if anyone is abused, it’s Casey, for putting up with too much, refusing to strike and valuing his “wooden medal”.  In Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre, the villainy of the “copper boss thug men” takes a back seat to the unfolding of the tragedy. The pattern begins to unravel somewhat in the ’60s. Tom Paxton’s Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation is personal, but still in a focused way: LBJ is a liar who sends us into an unwinnable war in spite of what he said in the campaign.The other element of the best protest music was poetry, the telling image. I’ve given a few examples already. In Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd, “Some will rob you with a six-gun/ And some with a fountain pen.” After the Punk revolution, vulgarity became acceptable in the protest song. One example is Mojo Nixon’s I ain’t gonna piss in no jar: “I ain’t gonna piss into no cup/unless Nancy Reagan’s gonna lap it up.” Agtain, a striking image, but more for its shock value… and intensely personal.

Setting the two works under discussion into this context, the differences can be seen to be generational (1938 vs. 1963 birth dates). Bolcom is working consciously in the Guthrie tradition, without the same solid practical grounding in the Anglo-Saxon ballad tradition. (One wonders what sort of agitprop music would have been written by Ross Lee Finney, Bolcom’s predecessor at the University of Michigan, who was a professional folksinger.) He IS very well grounded in the American Songbook tradition, as was Lehrer, and one wonders what an artisticly serious attempt by Bolcom would sound like. Rindfleisch’s poetic voice sounds like somebody who had grown up listening to the Feederz’ Jesus entering from the rear. I don’t know if he was ever guilty of playing punk rock. The music affects the surface of urbanity without the content, so not punkish at all. That raw energy would have improved it, I think.

Like these gentlemen, I am no good at keeping my mouth shut. I suppose I will get no more performances of my music by the Cleveland Contemporary Players; on the other hand, I’ll get no fewer either. I can’t think of a classical composer writing agitprop song whose work in that genre has become canonical. Since some of them worked with Berthold Brecht, this is not simply a matter of poetic skill. This leads me to believe that music would be better served if we all found a different outlet for our political agitations, and made art for art’s sake. I’ll admit that I have a hard time taking my own advice here; there is certainly at least generalized political (or more accurately, anti-political) content in my Assault March of the Assistant Deputy County Environmental Safety Director. And I’ve written a libretto for an opera about the hen who bakes bread, updated for modern conditions. But neither of those works are in the agitprop/mass song tradition. So Bill, how about that next symphony for band? Andy, how about some more choruses or brass pieces?

Act of militant capitalism: GE Capital

It was announced yesterday that GE Capital (aka Obama’s Haliburton) will not be lending money to or through gun dealers. Well, fine; that’s their right. And it’s our right not to deal with anyone who deals with GE Capital. Mr. Denninger observed that GE Capital helpfully lists the companies that use their credit services. Since they might not be so helpful in the future, I am listing these companies on one convenient page below:

Automotive Parts & Services
• America’s Tire
• American Car Care Centers
• CarCarONE
#Discount Tire
#Kauffman Tire
• Maaco
• Meineke
#Midas
#Pep Boys
Electronics & Appliances
• Abt
• BERNINA
• Bjorns
• BrandsMart USA
• Conns
• Crutchfield
• Goedekers
#hhgregg
• OneCall
• Paul’s TV inside Art Van
• PC Richard & Son
• Sony Store
• Vanns
• Westrich
Flooring
• Adairs
• Carpet Barn
• Carpet Mill Outlet
• Carpet One
• Carpeteria
• Flooring America
• Jabaras
• Lumber Liquidators
• Mohawk
• Pierce Flooring
• Sam Kinnairds Flooring
• Shaw Floors
• World of Floors inside Art Van
Healthcare
#CareCredit
Sporting Goods
• Freedom to Ride
• Golfsmith
• Specialzed Bicycles
Home Furnishings
• American Signature
• Art Van
• Ashley
• Drexel
• Furniture World IN
• Furniture World PA
• Grand
• Havertys
• Hudsons
• Johnny Janosik
• L Fish
• La-Z-Boy Furniture Galleries
• Mattress Discounters
• Metro Mattress
• Morris
• Pieratts
• Regency
• Rooms To Go
• Sheelys
• Sleep Country
• Sleep Number (Glenn, Rush, what ya gonna do?)
• Sleep Train
• Sleepys
• Thomasville
#Value City
• Westrich
#World Market
Home Improvement
• Bargain Outlet
• Blains
#Champion Windows
• McCoys
• Sutherlands
• System Pavers
Heating & Air Conditioning
• Bryant
• Lennox
• Service Experts
• York
Jewelry
• Diamonds on Web
• Tappers
• Tivol
• Ultra Diamonds
Lawn & Garden
#Husqvarna
• System Pavers
#Toro
Music
• Sam Ash (the one here is conveniently near Guitar Center )
Glasses & Eye Care
#LensCrafters
Power Sports
• Kawasaki
• Suzuki

The ones I’ve marked with a hashmark are the only ones I’ve used or would be likely to use. And there’s no pain involved in giving up any of them. I’ve cancelled credit cards for gun-banning banks before; this is much easier.

The Kingdom paradox

Today’s text (via John T. Kennedy, on Facebook):

“Here is an unfair way of choosing political systems: compare the worst form of anarchy to the best form of government; one then finds that government looks pretty good. The comparison between Somalia and the United States would be a case in point. A fairer comparison would be between Somalia before and after its government collapsed, or between Somalia and other societies in the same region that have governments.[8] Even better would be to compare the best feasible governmental system with the best feasible nongovernmental system. That is what I suggest in the book,[9] and that is the comparison that I tried to conduct over the course of part II. Anarchists do not hold that all anarchic situations are desirable any more than advocates of government defend all governments, including those of Nazi Germany, Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Khmer Rouge.”

What interests me here is WHY the disparity in comparisons exists. This discussion will involve both politics and theology, so both my Catholic and political friends will find something to offend them. Take the things that you don’t believe in as metaphors.

We have a fairly good idea on how to fix suboptimum governments. If they are only slightly dysfunctional, and are democratic, we can replace bad people with good people, who will replace bad law with good law. In practice, this is difficult, as good people tend to become bad people, and because the virtue of the citizenry is a limiting factor; i.e., they have to be able to look beyond their own narrow self-interest. If the dysfunction is deeper, the entire system can be replaced through revolution. This is very expensive in terms of blood and capital, and of uncertain success. But there is a long tradition of doing so.

But we have no idea at all on how to fix suboptimum anarchies, because we have no tradition of anarchy. One does not fix an anarchy through voting, because there are no elections, and nothing to elect people to. One does not do so through revolution, as there is nobody to revolt against, and any armed force strong enough to reset the institutions of an anarchy is a de facto government. It would seem that one must destroy the anarchy in order to save it.

If one posits an anarcho-capitalist / market anarchy society, it functions through the voluntary cooperation of its citizens. Thus, if the society functions suboptimally, it must be because cooperation is suboptimal. If one compels the citizens to cooperate, one no longer has an anarchy. Thus, one must persuade one’s fellow citizens to improve their cooperation. If the failures are fairly specific, they can be addressed by concrete proposals: “If we did THIS, things would work better.” “This” could be tried in a community, and if it proved successful, other communities would adopt it. And of course market forces are one of the main means of cooperation.

But what if the breakdown in cooperation was due to the will of the citizens? What if they don’t WANT to cooperate in a particular way? What if their self-interest conflicts with their neighbor’s interest? One possible solution would be to fix the moral basis of the citizenry, so that they see their neighbor’s self-interest as their own. But that’s a solution many libertarians are uncomfortable with, as it implies religion.  And “to fix” anarchism in such a way implies either forcing religion into the citizenry  (in which case, no anarchism), or else taking the matter out of political philosophy entirely and concentrating on religion. Since we have no other acceptable idea on how to fix anarchies, it is natural to use the worst anarchy in comparisons. On the other end, the better governments and anarchies are, the more they resemble each other. I call this the “Kingdom of Heaven paradox”: Is Heaven a perfect government where Christ rules with a rod of iron, or is it a perfect anarchy, since everyone there seeks to do the will of God?  Can you be forced to do what you want to do anyway? The better citizens are, the less government is necessary; the worse they are, the more government is necessary. So perhaps the most revolutionary act is to guide the citizenry toward holiness. This means friction with the State, because the State’s self-interest is to discourage reliance on anything besides itself, and the State will do what it legally can to erode morality and moral institutions.  This suggests that a necessary activity of religion is to erode the State. There are plenty of peaceful ways of doing this without directly confronting power: agorism and mutual aid are two examples. The Amish can be our guide here.

Smile and say cheese

Folks have been wondering just how Boston Massacre II will be used to curtail our liberties. It certainly will be, as the Chicago Gang will never let a good crisis go to waste.  This one has messed with the gun control agenda a bit, so it needs to work overtime. (indeed, the bad timing is evidence against it being a false flag operation). We’ve been joking around at home about “assault style pressure cookers” with “black tactical grips.”. But I think this time they will mandate rather than ban something.

As I was reading at Ace that they had a suspect, it came to me. There’s been a crapload of video to work with in this case, as everybody has been capturing their loved ones at the finish line. And there’s been amazing crowdsourced analysis. Really, video is the hero of this case… which means that Sgt. Video will get a promotion.  The degree of video surveillance common to the UK is coming to every major city in America.  The Federal government will fund it, and conservatives will cheer.

UPDATE 4/20: The Boston Globe validates the comments above.

4/23 And Gauleiter Bloomberg weighs in.

Well, yesterday sucked

…less for me than for a bunch of people on Boylston St., but for me too. And for you. Anything that makes our world feel less safe is a Bad Thing. I had just finished a batch of CD cataloging and thought I’d take a break via Twitter. Whoops… the rest of the day wasn’t so productive. I have a Facebook friend who lives on Boylston. She heard an explosion, later on saw blood all down the street. And then Barnhardt stuck up a picture of a person in a wheelchair with a soup bone where her leg should have been. Yes, she’s into Truth. And Beauty. And that Truth Who is Beauty. So, Ann, could you please go back to the pictures of angels and saints carrying assault weapons?

The most offensive thing about this is that here we have an event celebrating the achievements of the human body. And right where those bodies achieved their goal, they were damaged beyond repair. It seems blasphemous, a punishment for excellence. I don’t know who among the injured were athletes, if any, but in a sense it doesn’t matter; the crowd united its thought to those who struggled to finish. Well, then, say “Νενικήκαμεν” and die; we will overcome the Persians and their neighbors, or whoever was responsible for this.