Dear March, come in!

Welcome, solfeggists!

As I look out my window today, I could easily be hoodwinked into believing that spring has arrived in Denver -- but, I've lived here long enough to know this is almost certainly just a tease.  I grew up on the west coast, and by now, we'd be at the end of crocus season and the daffodils would be raring to take over with tulips close on their heels, but here....not so much.  However, the 60-degree weather is a welcome change, though I know it's only for the next few days (for you non-Coloradans out there, I like to think of Denver as the only place I know where people could reasonably dream of a White Easter and probably eat their Thanksgiving Dinner on their outdoor picnic table later the same year...it's a weird place)....I have to make the most of bits of spring as they come here, since there's often just a stark segue from the last April or May blizzard directly into summer.

So, let's find some springtime music to enjoy!

Rising Level 2's


Here's a recording to listen to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf6P2K_uXH8

(There are plenty of other recordings of this piece on YouTube, and feel free to choose another one if you like it better)

Try to figure out the rhythmic pattern you're hearing before you look at the score below - note that the meter isn't constant and that the pattern seems to be anacrusic.  Speak the rhythmic pattern in tas and ta-tis, then transcribe it.

Check your transcribed rhythm against the score here:


http://www2.cpdl.org/wiki/images/7/74/Lejeune_Revecy.pdf

What metric decisions did you make aurally?  Do they differ from the notation here?  How?

Now, sing through the various parts in solfa -- nothing too difficult, yes?  Almost completely diatonic (the odd fi and di pop up, but nothing earth-shattering), and lots of stepwise motion. What do you notice about the texture throughout the piece.

Finally, read this little Wikipedia write-up on the genre this piece is frequently used to exemplify in music history classes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_mesurée

So yeah, it's a piece about spring, but evidently it was also one more weapon in the arsenal of a bunch of French guys looking to save the world through music.  Some commentators have also said that the  rhythmic pattern of this little ditty (though the same pattern is also found in Latin American dances) was actually Bernstein's inspiration for writing this piece...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjy9acXwovE

Rising Level 3's


Listen to this lovely tune:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjJzPok_qmE

After one time through the whole recording, I bet you'll be able to derive the form of each strophe -- what is the form?  What is the meter?  How long does each phrase last?

Now that you have that information, listen a few more times and put each line into solfa.  Which line has the chromatic bit?  What interval does the chromatic syllable create with the note it is approached by?  How does the singer in the recording treat the chromatic note?

Memorize the melody.  Transcribe it in a key comfortable for your voice.

Now, look at this score:

(higher voices)
http://conquest.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/c/c0/IMSLP46772-PMLP99648-Mozart_-_Sehnsucht_nach_dem_Fr__hlinge__K_596.pdf

(lower voices)
http://javanese.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/0/0e/IMSLP115749-PMLP99648-Mozart_-_Sehnsucht_MV_rsl.pdf

Does your solfa line up with what you see here?

Now, notice how simple the accompaniment is...you probably discerned that from the recording (although the pianist there added some fancy stuff), and maybe you even saw this phase of the assignment coming...

Do a quick Roman numeral analysis of the accompaniment, including figured bass.

Now, either working from your figured bass (which might prove to be easier) or from the score, accompany yourself as you sing the memorized melody in solfa.  If that's easy, transpose to a new key.

Rising Level 4's


Listen to this piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MhxgM84Th8&feature=related

Listen to the whole thing the first time to get a sense of what happens in the piece.  Then, focus on the first statement of the melody by the sopranos and altos.  What is the metric structure of this theme -- is there one meter throughout, or are there several (hint: watch the conductor...he's extremely clear!)?  What is the tonal language being used?

The words (drawn from the Song of Solomon in the Bible) are:

Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south;
Blow upon my garden
That the spices may flow out
That the spices flow out
Let my beloved come into his garden
And eat his pleasant fruits.


Memorize the theme (upper part when it splits briefly) with the words.  Notice that it is treated imitatively later in the piece -- what do you think this depicts?

Now for the tricky part -- try to solmize this.  It won't be easy, but I bet you can do it.  You have my permission to use piano to help yourself if you get reeeeeeeeally stuck, but try to go without it as much as possible.  Here are my hints:

You will probably be tempted to call the first leap in the melody mi-la.  You can do that, but it'll mean you'll need to use fi several times later on.  However, the good news is that that's the only chromatic syllable you'll need at all -- and you won't even need that if you call the first leap la-re.

The first note and last note of the tune are the same.

The highest note in the piece is an octave and a fifth above the starting note.

If you successfully solmize the whole theme, you should transcribe it and send it to me and I will tell you that you're wonderful and send you a prize.  No, seriously, I will.

Good luck, all, and have a fantastic week!

Choose to Bless the World

Greetings, dear friends!

Well, it's happened....I got older today -- a nice prime number this time around, and have had a great day of feeling extremely loved and remembered.  What more could a person want?

It's been a busy weekend (ergo the late post!), but a good one, filled in part with rehearsals with my beloved Denver Gay Men's Chorus.  They're prepping for a very exciting collaboration at the moment, and one of the pieces they've begun rehearsing has struck quite a chord with me, especially as a new year of life begins.  The piece is "Choose to Bless the World" by Nick Page, and is based on three divergent somewhat unlikely elements: Page's own arrangement of "Niska Banja," a poem by a Unitarian Universalist minister named Rebecca Parker, and Michael Praetorius' well-known canon "Jubilate Deo" --   you can listen to/watch a recording of one of my new favorite people conducting it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xabP5G-Q1A

(I know, it has the Lentenly forbidden A-word, but try to forgive me...)

The full text of the poem is this:

Your gifts
whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world.
The mind's power,
The strength of the hands,
The reaches of the heart,
the gift of speaking, listening, imagining, seeing, waiting
Any of these can serve to feed the hungry,
bind up wounds,
welcome the stranger,
praise what is sacred,
do the work of justice
or offer love.
Any of these can draw down the prison door
hoard bread,
abandon the poor,
obscure what is holy,
comply with injustice
or withhold love.
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.

Cynicism and exhaustion are by-products of almost any graduate program, I think (and as many of my AKI students will likely attest), and it can be hard to remember that we still have a choice.  We don't have to buy into the drama that our little grad program worlds tend to create.  Or, if we do, we can catch ourselves and make a new choice.  The circumstances of our lives are what they are, and on days when we're feeling the burn, it can be so hard to remember this, but we still have a choice.  In every moment, no matter how crappy we think we are, no matter how hard things have been, no matter how little we think we have to offer, the choice is still there.  We can choose to bless the world....and the secret wonder of making that choice is that it doesn't take anything away from us to do this.  Our egos and bone-weariness might convince us that trying to bless the world is like trying to get blood from a turnip.  But, it's not a matter of trying.  It's a matter of choosing to honor what we already are in a state of being....we are each and all a blessing to the world.


So, if you have the energy and the inclination, there are lots of cool things you could transcribe from the recording above, or you could teach yourself to hand-sign the canon in two parts (or three -- one with your voice and one with each hand), or you could always catch up on your sight-singing.  However, the assignment I'm going to work hard to embrace this week and in the coming year is this:


All Levels:
Choose to bless the world.

Holding steady

Hello, stalwart solfeggists!

It's been a crazy week in my world, and the weekend has left me with very little room to breathe.  So, this week's installment will be short, but (hopefully) pithy.

In your Ottman book, chapter 18 is all about forbidding-looking rhythms, specifically, those that use very small divisions of the beat.  Recently, I've been teaching some rhythmically challenging pieces in choral contexts, and it's once again come to my attention that many folks use a repetitive physical gesture (foot or hand-tapping, usually) when they encounter any sort of rhythmic difficulty, and they usually try to tap to a pretty small rhythmic value.  I understand the inclination to do this, but I'm quite opposed to it.  Why?

-We tend to be taught as children that our western rhythmic system is based on mathematical operations, and that's not really true (I mean, it's factual in a way to say that rhythm is mathematical, but math is not nearly as influential on our experience of rhythm as we think it is).  Our rhythmic system is extremely influenced by hierarchy, and it is hierarchy that makes a rhythmic pattern feel how it feels to us.  Therefore, if we don't reflect hierarchy in any aid we use to read a rhythm, we're sabotaging ourselves.

-Tapping a small rhythmic value as your "beat" the same way over and over (without any kind of hierarchy) is a recipe for getting lost.  Your brain barely has a fighting chance of keeping track of all that repetitive motion, despite what your sense of security might be trying to tell you.  We tend to feel like we're being more accurate because we're doing something, but the something we're doing in this case is likely to just distract us from inaccuracies.

-Rhythmic patterns aren't made difficult by speed, they're made difficult by unpredictability or unfamiliarity.  So, slowing something far past the point of its intended tempo is probably less useful than we think -- the composer heard it inside her/his head as a pattern that made sense at a given tempo, and if we get too far away from that tempo, the pattern doesn't feel the same way anymore.

-Our brains aren't wired to perceive quick notes as isolated incidents, but rather as elements of a pattern that has a specific interplay within an established hierarchy.

Now, these rules start to fall apart if you start working with some types of early music or 20th/21st-century serialized rhythms or rhythms chosen through chance operations, etc., but the Ottman examples we're dealing with here definitely play by these rules.  So, I'm going to insist on a few things:

1. Conduct.  This doesn't necessarily have to be a traditional hand/arm pattern, but you have to do something with your body that shows the beats of the measure in distinct places AND gives a sense of which beats are strong in the hierarchy of the meter and which are not.  For example, if you were to use your foot in a 2/4 meter, you could decide that your heel touching the ground would be beat 1 and your toe touching the ground would be beat 2.

2. Don't stray too far from the notated tempo.  A conservative tempo is one thing, but if you're thinking in 32nd notes, the rhythm you think you're performing has nothing to do with the actual piece of music the composer wrote (unless it's in 3/32 or some such craziness).

3. If you're struggling with notes and rhythms together, isolate the rhythm.

4. Think in groupings and phrases, not in isolated note values.  Start to see that the last sixteenth note of a beat will feel like a pickup to (or a decoration of) the beat that follows, etc.  Just like in the world of pitches, the magic of rhythmic patterns has everything to do with the relationships being expressed.

5. Trust your body.  Before you begin reading each example, take the time to really ground yourself in the the meter by moving (see item 1).  Once you've started reading, if something seems wrong, see if you can figure out a reason -- it might just be a mistake, or it might be a misplaced metric accent, or an unusual phrase length, etc.  Trust that your body knows how a good, solid 4/4 ought to feel, even if it's slow, and if something happens to upset your expectations, be a good detective and figure out why.

Rising Level 2's

Try your hands/feet/voices at these...ignore any grace notes:

18.1 & 18.2
18.12 & 18.13
18.16
18.17 (make sure you look carefully at the key)
18.22
18.29

Rising Level 3's


Give these your best shot:

18.18
18.19
18.21
18.23
18.25 (don't let the sixteenth rests freak you out)
18.26

Rising Level 4's


Your examples are longer and more complex, so you can spread them out over multiple days as you see fit:


18.30
18.31
18.32
18.34

So, hold steady and don't let the little notes scare you -- they're just a decorative part of the whole, and if you approach them calmly, they'll fall into place.

PS: It looks like I lied about this post being short...sometimes that happens when we get going, I guess...my apologies!

O tell me the truth about love

Greetings, much-loved solfeggists!

First, in honor of Valentine's Day, please indulge me in reading the following by one of my all-time favorite poets, W.H. Auden.  Benjamin Britten set it and three of Auden's other poems about love in his "Cabaret Songs" -- you can follow this link to hear a performance of all four songs (the audio quality isn't the best....sorry!).

Some say that love's a little boy, and some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round, and some say that's absurd:
But when I asked the man next door who looked as if he knew,
His wife grew very cross indeed and said it wouldn't do.


Does it look like a pair of pyjamas or the ham in a temperance hotel?
O tell me the truth about love.
Does its odour remind one of llamas, or has it a comforting smell?
O tell me the truth about love.
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, or soft as an eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.


I looked inside the summerhouse, it wasn't ever there,
I've tried the Thames at Maidenhead and Brighton's bracing air;
I don't know what the blackbird sang or what the roses said,
But it wasn't in the chicken run or underneath the bed.


Can it pull extraordinary faces?  Is it usually sick on a swing?
O tell me the truth about love.
Does it spend all its time at the races, or fiddling with pieces of string?
O tell me the truth about love.
Has it views of its own about money? Does it think patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar, but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.


Your feelings when you meet it, I am told, you can't forget,
I've sought it since I was a child but haven't found it yet;
I'm getting on for thirty-five, and still I do not know
What kind of creature it can be that bothers people so.


When it comes, will it come without warning, just as I'm picking my nose?
O tell me the truth about love.
Will it knock on my door in the morning, or tread in the bus on my toes?
O tell me the truth about love.
Will it come like a change in the weather?  Will its greeting be courteous or bluff?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.


Clearly, Auden isn't being too serious about all this (ergo the allusion to nose-picking), but his request is well-taken.  We've all been enculturated into the rosiest of illusions about love, courtesy of the Disney princesses, Hallmark, eHarmony, etc.  We've also seen the reality of our own and others' relationships, and the cognitive dissonance between the illusory and the real can be hard to take.  In particular, I've been noticing that this concept of the ideal often prevents people from having the guts to talk about what's real (and what's really bothering us) because we feel guilty that we haven't managed somehow to magick fantasy into reality.  Then, we get resentful because things drift ever further away from the way we want them to be, and it becomes harder and harder to salvage whatever's gone wrong.  Luckily, no one has a perfect memory, and we all forget many of our disappointments, which turns into a kind of accidental forgiveness....but it's clear that this isn't a real solution, and sometimes it isn't so easy to wait until the feelings pass.

My rising level 3's will remember me saying several times this summer:

Solfa is like therapy.  When you talk about your problems, it becomes a lot easier to solve them.

I'd like to add to that:

Your relationship to your own ideal musical self is like any other relationship.  It doesn't thrive because you feel fuzzy about it.  It thrives because you work on it.

This is not to say that you shouldn't enjoy the work.  Lucky for us, there's a lot to love about being a musician, and we should strive to immerse ourselves in the most satisfying parts of that as often as we can, whether that's performing, listening, composing, whatever.  But, there's also spinach to be eaten...and we can't expect to be virtuosi if we shy away from the aspects of our musicianship that fall short.  We have to be honest about them.  We have to talk about them.  We have to give them some attention, and be ok with the fact that it might be intellectually and emotionally difficult in the short run. But, if we believe it's worth it, we have to try.

All Levels:


Take a look at this love song by Hans Leo Hassler:

http://www3.cpdl.org/wiki/images/sheet/hassler/hass-gmu.pdf

The gist of the text is, "Woe is me, I'm in love with someone too good for me..."

Sing through the melody first, and then as many of the harmony parts as you care to tackle.

Memorize the melody


Do a chordal analysis (rising 2's, do as much as you dare) -- you can take your pick of solfa chords (meaning that you start with a Do major) or Roman numerals.

Then, look at this setting of essentially the same melody:

http://www.saengerkreis-bamberg.de/noten/geistlich/passion/Bach_WennIchEinmalSollScheiden.pdf

Sing through the parts, and do a Roman numeral analysis (again, as you are able).

The text of this verse of the chorale (taken from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and this harmonization is sung just after Christ dies) is:

When I must once and for all depart,
then do not depart from me;
when I must suffer death,
then stand by me;
when my heart will be
most fearful,
then snatch me from the terrors
by the virtue of your own fear and pain!


....and suddenly it's a whole other kind of love song.  You can listen to it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Q6rxdPT7A

And finally, to answer Mr. Auden's question:

Love is little, love is low
Love will make my spirit grow
Grow in peace, grow in light,
Love will do the thing that's right.
(Shaker Hymn)

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Power of Suggestion

Greetings from snow-blanketed Denver!

The Universe gave me the unexpected gift of a snow day yesterday -- despite my disappointment in the cancellation/delay of conference events at my British Studies gig, I must confess how badly I'd needed a real day off.

A little time to think and gather myself, plus a few conversations with my graduate colleagues and some of my private students, have brought the article below back to my mind:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/12/07/143265882/vowels-control-your-brain?sc=fb&cc=fp

The gist of the article is this: front vowels ([i], [I], [e], [E]) tend to imply smallness or lightness, and back vowels ([u], [o], [a]) tend to imply heaviness or largeness.  Obviously, this isn't completely universal, but there are definitely some pretty convincing examples in the article.

What does this have to do with solfa, you ask?  Well...I have a bit of a pet theory that I can't exactly prove yet that Guido's choice of syllables (and the later evolution of our modern syllables, including chromatics) wasn't merely coincidental with the beginning of each line of the chant Ut queant laxis.  I believe the syllables were chosen intuitively and intentionally to phonetically represent both the tendencies and the relative placement of each tone.  Furthermore, I believe these vowel choices had some impact on the evolution from a modal to a tonal system.

Here's what I mean -- the original six syllables were ut, re, mi, fa, so, & la.  If we go strictly by the rubric above, ut, fa, so, and la fall into the category of back vowels, and re & mi belong to the front vowel category.  I would argue that Guido's Italianate [a] would have been more toward the bright (front) side, especially in the case of la, since the dental [l] pulls the tongue forward (resulting in a more fronted vowel).  Let's leave fa in the back vowel camp for now, and assume that we now have this situation:

ut (heavy)
re (light)
mi (light)
fa  (heavy)
so (heavy)
la  (light)

or in the more modern system:

do (heavy) 

re (light) 

mi (light)

fa  (heavy)

so (heavy)

la  (light)

ti  (light)

Now, as speakers of American-accented English, we pronounce these syllables differently, so they feel a little different to us, and our pronunciation idiosyncrasies create intonation issues different from the ones likely encountered in 11th-century Italy.  If we think carefully about our pronunciation, however, the tendencies of these vowels reflect the proper intonation for a major scale, especially if we designate the vowel [o] as "stable" rather than "heavy" (which seems an allowable substitution to me):

do (stable) 

re (light)             (note that the resulting do-re-mi 3rd should be wide)

mi (light)

fa  (heavy)

so (stable)

la  (light)

ti  (light)

If this theory holds water, it casts some significant doubts on the pedagogical wisdom of both fixed-do solfege (where the vowels are at least partly contradictory of correct intonation in all keys except C) and do-based minor (where the syllables me, le, & te are used to denote the lowered 3rd, 6th, and 7th scale degrees in minor, and each has a vowel that still implies "highness" -- la to le being particularly egregious).  In my earlier years, I felt much more absolute about all this.  These days, I'm more willing to acknowledge that vowel influence is probably much stronger for some people than it is for others.  However, from an acoustical standpoint, this all seems to hold up, too, and if physical fact gives one system even a small advantage over another, I think that's worth acknowledging.  If vowels can suggest to ear and voice that two notes have a certain relationship to one another, why not use the power of suggestion to our students' advantage?

I'm curious to know what you all think about this, and I'd like you to try it out and let me know:

All Levels

Read the NPR article and all my verbiage above.

Track down your Ottman book and read some examples that come easily for you (ch. 2-9, as appropriate).  The first time through, sing without thinking much about the syllables -- just sing as you normally would.  The second time through, be extremely sensitive to your pronunciation of each syllable.  Does your intonation improve?  Do you feel an increased sensitivity to the proper intonation of each syllable/interval?  If you like, choose a few examples in minor and try singing them once in do-based minor and once in la-based minor, both times with a strong focus on pronunciation.  Was it hard to get the intonation of the lowered scale degrees correct in do-based minor?  Try singing an example or two in fixed-do (no chromatic inflections, meaning that F-flat, F, and F-sharp are all called fa), still with an eye towards pronunciation.  What happens to your intonation?  

I'm really quite curious to hear what you discover...

A Farewell to Agony

Greetings, dear students!

Now, before anyone panics, I'm talking about self-inflicted agony here.  This isn't the kind of agony that can't be avoided, the kind that comes from outside.  This is the kind of agony we bring upon ourselves by fixating on all the wrong stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZWZqTD5Hg&feature=related

In general, I'm sort of a chronic agonizer....I've talked about the symptoms lots of times, and I know many of us could cop to the same sort of thing: something complex or unexpected happens, and we spend endless amounts of time thinking about why it happened, whose fault it is, all the various ways we could respond, the possible consequences of each of those responses, all the things we'd like to do about it but probably shouldn't, etc.  It's crazy-making.  It seems to be one of my favorite pastimes.  And I think it's time to quit.

So, four weeks into the new year, I'm determined to make this something I work on: giving up on agony.  This is hard, because I know for a fact that the processes behind my agonizing (attention to detail, a propensity for empathy, the desire for clear communication) aren't bad human qualities at all, and in fact, they've played a huge role in my personal and professional success.  But, they're kind of like tonsils as Bill Cosby used to describe them in his stand-up routines -- tonsils are like big security guards armed with bazookas that stand guard against germs, but sometimes something goes wrong and they join the other side.  Tonsillectomy, as I learned at the age of four, isn't a pleasant solution, but it's a permanent one.  The problem with the other side of this little analogy is that it's not desirable (and probably not possible) to remove qualities like empathy or attention to detail or a desire to understand/be understood, so there's no scalpel involved in the long-term fix...it's got to be a moment-by-moment management kind of thing.  I need to find a way to be empathetic, detail-oriented, and a person who desires to communicate clearly, but also to stop myself from obsessing over the stuff in life I can't change or control.  This has become clearer to me over the last few days through several performance experiences wherein I almost managed to steal the joy of performing from myself by working myself into a tizzy about the details rather than trusting the process.  I don't want to be that guy.  I want to be happy.  So, if being happy means I have to be brave enough to change, so be it.

I've spoken before about using solfa as a kind of mindfulness exercise, a way to reinforce the kind of thinking that makes us into healthier and happier people.  Sight-reading in particular forces us to live in the present and continually move on from any setbacks if we wish to be successful, so I've got some of that on tap for you this week:

All Levels


Before you even go hunting for your Ottman, refresh your own memory as to the procedures behind good sight-singing:

1. Look ahead.
2. Pick a good tempo and maintain it -- conducting is a very good idea!
3. Ground yourself in the key.
4. Keep your eye moving ahead of your voice.
5. If you make a mistake, keep going.

Rising Level 2's


Ottman, ch. 9 is your playground.  Pay attention to the character/tempo markings in the book, and try to find examples you don't already know.  Read 2-3 examples per day -- I bet you'll find that your strategy gets better between the first and third example of a given day.

Rising Level 3's


Go nuts with Ottman, ch. 12.  If you find that you know most of the examples already, expand your search to ch. 11 and include some C-clef examples (you're allowed to pretend you're in a different key if you want).  Read 2-3 examples per day.

Rising Level 4's


Take a look at Ottman, ch. 16.  The main challenge of this chapter is meant to be rhythmic rather than melodic, but I'd like you to work with the melodic examples (16.37 and up).  If you get in over your head in terms of chromaticism, you have my permission to backtrack.  Read 2-3 examples per day.

Good luck, dear students!

The Morning Star

Greetings, dear solfeggists!

I'm safely through my last first week of classes as a graduate student, and the part about safe is more important to me than usual.  Why?  Well, there's been a little weirdness afoot in my life, and I think I've had an indirect hand in it, but I'm not entirely sure how to reverse it....or if I want to.

You see, for much of the holiday break, there was a fair amount of hand-wringing going on around my house about the future.  Theoretically, I only have to start worrying about the future in earnest if I really pull myself together and graduate like I'm planning to, so I could put those worries off.  However, I've reached that point of needing to graduate for the sake of my sanity...a hundred miles of driving for every school day simply can't continue indefinitely.  So, over break I realized that means I need a plan, and I need it sort of immediately, and I drove myself up the wall for a week or so worrying about what the plan was going to entail.  Then, once I got good and exhausted from that, I changed my tune.  Nobody can control the future -- it'll be what it'll be, and I can get myself as ready as I can be, but I can't control it.  I can look for jobs, apply for jobs, make my CV look like a million bucks, ask everyone I've ever met for letters of recommendation, and put together the best conducting video known to humankind, and I still won't be able to control the future.  So, I started saying to the Universe:

Look....I'm throwing myself on your mercy.  I'm scared, but here we go.

And, after the last week, I'm not sure I can recommend this course of action if what you want is peace of mind, but I can definitely recommend it if you're looking for some excitement.  Of course, there's no way to say for certain that my change in perspective has caused any of this, but suddenly things are moving in quite an unusual way, quite an unexpected way, and I'm not comfortable with it, but I'm too curious about it to dig in my heels.  I still can't control the future, and the future is now looking a lot more open than I expected just a few weeks ago.  For the first time in a long time, it looks like an adventure instead of a series of bills I have to figure out how to pay or deadlines I have to meet.  And really, it only took a week of strangeness, just a few odd incidents to shake me into this renewed perspective.  I don't know what's going to happen.  I know a few things have started to happen that I didn't expect, and if they can blindside me like that, just about anything else could follow.  I'm only writing my own lines in this script, and there's no way of knowing for sure what anyone else will do or say or what their timing will be like.  So, we have to improvise, roll with the punches, keep the center of gravity low...and realize that we are at the mercy of a lot of forces we don't control or fully understand.

In the midst of all of this, we can be especially grateful that we are musicians.  Why?  Well, we are bearers of a tradition that has bequeathed us the best kind of toolkit for dealing with chaos and unpredictability: beauty, and the knowledge that it is fleeting.

All Levels:


I can't think of a better example of this than Bach, a musical Rumpelstiltskin par excellence....the man not only knew how to seize a moment, he could spin a simple tune like this one (about the beauty of the morning star) into a masterpiece like no one else:

http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Scores/BWV001-V&P.pdf

Begin with the chorale at the end of the piece (p. 41).  Sing through each part in solfa, paying particular attention to the soprano melody.  Notice the form of the tune (you must take the repeat).  If you're a rising level 3, you may recognize it from the duet in Cantata 37 from a few weeks back.

Memorize the melody....believe me, it's worth keeping in your mental library.

Now, go back to the beginning of the piece and sing the soprano part of the whole piece.  Does it look/sound familiar?  How does this part function in relationship to the other three voice parts, both in terms of form and texture?  Do the parts come together homophonically at any point?  If so, why do you think it happens there?  You may want to refer to the text translation in order to answer that last question.

Tackle as many of the other voice parts in the opening movement as you feel able to deal with.  There is definitely some flirting with other key areas going on, but Bach doesn't stray too far.....why do you think that is?

If you found all of that reasonably easy, do a Roman numeral analysis of the final chorale and compare it to the key areas visited/referenced in the opening movement.  Is there any correspondence?

My friends, embrace the beauty around you -- in the morning star, in the stark beauty of winter, in your lives and the lives of other people.  We don't know what's going to happen.  But, we have what we have right now.