How Much.....?

I think a really good exercise is to change our language about work and income.   What if we answer the question, "What do you make?" with our work, instead of with our income?  For instance, a teacher makes educated students.  A police officer makes security.    

Then our income level becomes the answer to the question "What do you take?"

I think this is a more accurate way of thinking about it.   Our income is what gives us our power to consume - to take.  Our work is what we do for others - how we serve others - what we make.

And I am not implying that there is anything wrong with taking - many people do wonderful things with the income they take, and many people deserve to take more than others because of the nature of their work.   But I think this way of thinking helps us with our priorities and how we give respect to others.

I Have Got It.

I have got it. If some people running for office are so concerned that so many American don't pay federal income tax (they are not counting payroll tax, federal fuel tax, state income tax, sales tax, etc.), then why don't they propose raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour? Sooooo many more people would be paying federal income tax.

But wait, now some are saying that some businesses cannot afford to pay that much? So basically there are businesses out there that need people to be poor in order to stay in business?

Then why are we complaining that they don't pay federal income tax again?

A Few Quick Thoughts....

A few thoughts after some exchanges on a conservative religious blog.

One:  These days, even critics of homosexuality accept that one is born that way, that it is not a conscious choice.  Yet they still reject gay marriage, which of course means that they think gay people are better off living lives without an immediate family.  My immediate family is absolutely integral to the meaning of my life.  Therefore, I see opposition to gay marriage as asking others to trade family life for lives of isolation.  And this is cruel.

Two:  We are standing on the shoulders of the ancients, not holding them up.

Three:  "God loves me more than he loves you."    Calvinism in a nutshell.

What's Going On?

 

This is just a quick note (mostly to myself, but also to online friends) about what's been going on.
 

I spend my mornings hanging out with the family.  Susan, Severin, Wolfgang and I play with cars, trains and play-dough.  We listen to music and dance, we get frustrated and go to time-out, we visit the Science Museum of Oklahoma, we go to the bookstore, we tell jokes, we dig in the dirt and run through the sprinkler (when it's not 111 degrees, like it was today), we play make-believe constantly - we are dinosaurs, construction diggers, fish, etc, etc.

It's busy!

Then I teach my lessons in the afternoon, supplemented by live performances and session work.

Time is still there for other things, but the required energy and focus sometimes are not!


However, I have been working on another string piece.  The title is still up in the air, but it will be something like "A Wandering Wind On A Prairie Pond"  or "Water Under Wind" or something like that.

I expect to have the first draft done sometime this month.  The key signatures are a bit difficult for high school, but I am hoping that an advanced group might have some luck with it.  A good college string section would be ideal.

I also hope to complete another, less technically demanding high school piece in 2012, and perhaps attempt some pieces for middle school orchestra.  I would love to work more as a composer/clinician with different groups - something I have really enjoyed doing in the past.

After getting a few more string pieces and performances under my belt, I hope to try a full orchestral work.  My goal would be to pursue subject matter reflective of the Oklahoma landscape and story.

Chamber music is my ultimate goal, and I look forward (with trepidation) to the day when I am able to premiere a string quartet.

I have also been listening to the music of Franz Joseph Haydn for several months now.  I am studying scores, reading more biographies and giving careful listens to his symphonies and string quartets.   This summer, we are lucky to have had the inaugural Oklahoma Haydn Festival at Mayflower Congregational Church here in Oklahoma City - the church I attend.

I had been rediscovering the music of Haydn for a few months when our organist announced the new festival and, needless to say, I was excited and flabbergasted at the timing.   I look forward to becoming involved with it next year.

I hope to write more about Haydn soon - he was a musician who built himself from the ground up, coming from truly humble beginnings.  Through his abilities and the circumstances of his career and relatively long life, he was a real rarity in history - an innovator, developing the Viennese classical style particularly in the realm of the symphony, the string quartet, and the piano sonata, and thereby building a foundation for Mozart and Beethoven, and yet he was also a perfecter - particularly in his works written after hearing the music of his great friend and true kindred spirit, Mozart.

Here are a few quick listening recommendations for anyone interested:

Symphony no. 39 in G min - a fantastic example of Haydn's mid-career "Sturm and Drang" period.   Storm and Drive!   Make sure the recording is a brisk tempo.

The "Fifths" string quartet in D minor - Opus 76 No. 2.   The opening movement is dominated by a motif of descending fifths.  Listen for them underneath many of the melodic passages.

The first movement of the "Drumroll" Symphony, no. 103 in Eb, from his last group of 12 symphonic compositions knows as the "London Symphonies".     Wonderful slow introduction, great melodic writing in the exposition  - powerful inventiveness in the development.

I hope to write more soon about my current hero of musical history.

In other news, I am still developing writings in my Theology From The Plain series, which is an attempt to write quick, clear descriptions of my current views of.....that which is.   It's a systematic attempt to organize and analyze my thinking, and of course any input from others is invaluable.   I hope to get a few things up in 2012.

To any readers, I wish you all the best in your current endeavors!!   I would love to hear about them.

The "High Classical Style"

The masters of the Viennese Classical school (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert) often have a quality to their music which has always spoken deeply to me.   It's an unfolding of melody, a skeletal structure of progressing pitch and rhythm produced by developing a simple theme or two, that carries us along on a seemingly effortless river of thought-in-sound.

Of course we know from Beethoven's extensive sketches and from Mozart's letters that these works were often produced with great effort.  Here is one simple and enjoyable exercise that can help us to appreciate this.

Play a recording of a famous symphony (I have some suggestions below) and then hit pause somewhere, perhaps after a phrase seems to complete.   Then try to guess what the music is going to do next by singing in your mind an imaginary phrase, an "aural-ization" of the direction the music might go.   Often, unless we try really hard, we simply imagine the phrase we already heard being repeated.  

Then hit play.   The music may repeat for a moment, or not, but it's off in a direction that makes us think "Of course that's what it does!   What else could it have possible done?  What didn't I think of that?"

Great examples of this are the expositions of the first movements of Mozart's Symphony #40 in G minor or Beethoven's Symphony #5 in C minor.  Or the opening movements of Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet (No. 19) or Haydn's  "Fifths" Quartet (Op. 76 No. 2).

Or Haydn's last symphony - #104 in D Major nicknamed the "London" Symphony.

I absolutely love this quote from "The Enjoyment of Music" by Joseph Machlis with Kristine Forney, speaking of the first movement of this piece.

"The movement proper, an Allegro in sonata form, is launched by an irresistible tune that has all the energy and verve of Haydn's mature style.  This theme and those that follow are shaped out of a few basic intervals in such a way that, despite the variety of the ideas, they all hang together.  There results the effortless continuity, the miraculous sense of rightness and inevitability that constitutes the essence of the high Classical style."

Theology From The Plain Courtesy of G.A. Compton

Rediscovering the poetry of my great-great uncle G.A. Compton has been a great joy over the last few years.   Many of his poems strike right at the heart of the ways I have come to think.  Here are three poems,  published in his 1950 book "Puns, Poetry and Prose", that make their way deeper and deeper into my soul everyday.  They are truly Theology From The Plain (albeit from Uncle Barry's West Virginia hills!).

Two Sermons

I went to hear a preacher.

How his lusty voice did ring!

He nomenclatured nameless Love

Just like a mundane thing.

One part of Love was vengeance,

To ablate an heired sin!

(Then, I hoped Love would be cheated

And feel a deep chagrin!)

I went to hear a robin

Help to mauve the ashy dawn,

And thought he’d burn the new leaves of

The twig he salaamed on.

Aurora flung her curtains

At the throbbing reveille,

And hallooed thru the windows,

That the preacher lied to me!

Crucibles

Without pain

Happiness

Could not be;

Heaven is 

Estimated thru

Gethsemane.

Without fear,

No stile would arise

With each stair a hope

Ending in the skies-

Pain, fear-

Finite crucibles

Purge us to merge

Into

Infinite seas.

Conformity

Just buckle on most any creed,

Like picking up a stole-

No creed was ever fitted, yet,

Exactly to each soul.

Convention says that you must wear

One o'er your sinful heart,

So put it on - but grow until

You burst the thing apart.

Listen! The Minuet of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor Opus 76, No. 2 "The Fifths"

I have been listening to string quartets constantly for the last couple of months.  Consisting of two violins, a viola, and a cello, it has always been one of my very favorite ensembles.   A quartet is capable of a wide expressive range but with an intimacy that has brought out the best in many of the Western classical tradition's greatest composers.

It has also been a very standard chamber ensemble for centuries, so there is a wealth of literature for this grouping.  Quartets are still very popular today, and since it is wedding season, I am performing in that context a lot these days!    Which is great!

The quartet was not invented by Franz Joseph Haydn, but he is surely the composer who, through his prolific writing for the ensemble in the second half of the 18th century, turned it into the staple it became for subsequent Classical, Romantic and modern composers.

The string quartet form typically mirrors that of the symphony.  It is in four movements with the opening movement in sonata allegro form.  The second movement is slow, often a theme and variations.  The third movement is a minuet and trio, and the last movement is lively, perhaps a rondo.

I am definitely a first movement kind of guy.  Give me the meat of the piece's aesthetic in sonata-allegro form.  Give me themes and development.  Yeah!

But second movements can often be the heart and soul of a quartet as well.  And fourth movements are often an excuse to write exciting, virtuosic parts.

It is the third movement that I am usually the least excited to hear.  A minuet is a dance in three with lots of repeats.   It is often a bit of....relaxation in an otherwise intense piece.  It can be a break, albeit a pretty break, in the action.  Frankly, it can be a bit boring compared to the other movements - particularly in the works of the Classical composers.

But not always!

I encourage you to check out Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, the second in a collection of six quartets that make up his Opus No. 76.  These are some of the last quartets he wrote, and the entire quartet is fantastic.  It is nicknamed "The Fifths" because the opening theme begins with a descending fifth (an interval covering five notes in the scale) which is then sequenced (repeated at a different pitch level) a fourth down. This opening movement is one of my favorites, but it is actually the third movement that I have listened to the most!  

It is in the typical minuet and trio form, but the minuet portion is written in strict canon.  The two violins begin the movement with a D minor melody played in octaves.  Then the viola and cello entire one measure later (three counts) with the exact same melody.   Both groups play the same notes (at different octaves), but one measure apart!   As you might guess, this is difficult to achieve.  The melody must be carefully constructed so that each measure harmonizes with the previous measure, and it must do so while maintaining its melodic integrity.

I encourage you to check out a recording of this piece.  Hooray for a truly exciting minuet!   Haydn was definitely the man.