Let me say right off that for the moment at least I cannot think of any reason for complaint, either against the government of the province of BC or that of the city of Nelson, on the subject of support for arts and culture in general. Even if we are only talking about my wife's domain of the past 25 years, the museum, archives, and art gallery, plus her long worn other hat, the arts council, we are talking bucks into the millions. And I would be guilty before Ottawa if I did not include the feds as well.
With my own personal projects however, even if it seemed to me that they were all directed eventually to the common good, I have always drawn a blank. Thus, when I began this run for the roses nine days ago, I was simply too battle wise to assume that either Victoria or the Queen City of the Kootenays, as it likes to call itself, would be happy to hear from me yet again, so I also wrote to an out- of- province jurisdiction. And for the first time in a long time it was not the Vatican. For some while I've had to assume that the only community I could expect practical results from was Rome, and even these were less than ideal. You should have been around about three months ago when my senior agent was blowing off steam about the Vatican propensity for publishing less than perfect stuff when all along it had had the genuine literary descendent of John of the Cross right under its nose.
It's probably just as well you weren't in the room. Jill, mother of the great Caitlin, has a temper like mine. I know. I ran into it one day when I happened upon her talking discipline to one of her kids. There are five of them, the oldest a weekend rugby player, and another a daughter, a voice student of mine who once shut down a very big room singing Gershwin's "Summertime" a capella.
I encountered it another time as well, when I once too often brought up the subject of approaching Microsoft over the software possibilities in the music scheme. In the natural order, I thought I had good reasons. Jill, after all, is related to someone very high in the that organization. But there was just something about that route she didn't like, so we didn't go that way.
And all the time I don't think she had any idea of the channel that would eventually open up. After all, who in this day and age would think that a provincial government would decide that maybe music should be a compulsory subject, not just some frill that comes or goes?
Then, some months ago, both houses caught the tail end of a news clip saying that Ontario was looking at such a change. Everybody's noses went up like an infield fly, including later, my oldest grandson's. He is now making CD's, singing, playing guitar with different bands, touring the country. And, at his age, busy being cool, but he grew up knowing authority, and I could see that the idea of a music teacher having as much clout as the other guys appealed to him, too, some day down the road. So I brooded over possibilities, I kept researching, and when I could no longer stand the idea of my more and more exciting discoveries being kept away from children, I fired up the Dell. To our own mayor, to the premier of BC, to the premier of Ontario. It was the furthest leader who answered first, yesterday. Dalton McGuinty has invited me to start talking with Kathleen Wynne, his minister of education. I began immediately.
He could, of course, be just trying to be polite. BC, and especially the south-east corner, are well known for oddballs and pseudo visionaries - at least in the minds of certain authorities and media outlets - and if you really go looking through the records you'll find out that for eleven years, back in the crucial days of Nelson's unfolding as an arts centre, I supported my numerous brood on the dole. Under one Welfare director, the reasons were understood. He and I had done kid care work together over the phone, without even meeting. Then came new Pharoahs, and the rules changed.
But I have always been an incurable optimist, who takes people at their word until they do something that robs them of that credit in my esteem, so I'm assuming that Ontario is at least willing to be serious until a fatal flaw shows itself, and that we're in business. I even took out my new Gibson Hummingbird last night for the sake of tidying up some loose numbers, and I don't mean tunes. It's a Sheryl Crow signature, built in Bozeman, Montana, the same state in which my great grandparents were married in 1889. (Great Falls had been a city but a year, and my great grandfather had just come out from a farm in Ontario, at Nanticoke,originally homesteaded around 1795 by a couple from Erie, Pennsylvania.)You should hear that baby sing, even if it's only doing my version of a scale. No, no. I didn't buy the Hummingbird on welfare. It was my late parents' estate that has given all that research a front end.
There's a kind of justice in this opening to the East. I first learned to sing in Vancouver as a little fellow. "Jesus loves me; You are my sunshine; Santa Claus is coming to town." I also remember finally getting the lips and the tongue just right for whistling, going up the lane east of Lincoln Street to see my friend David. But in Nova Scotia in grade three, in the school in Eastern Passage, the director of the upcoming musical rejected my attempt at an audition for a singing part.
This was hardly traumatic, and 15 months in Nova Scotia were a substantial part of my very good war, but I was left puzzled over this incident.
Enter Ontario. Cherry Valley, June of 44. My Dad is now a lieutenant and a gunnery instructor at the anti-aircraft range at Point Petre. Mom and I have a nice little house in town and I'm set up for a Tom Sawyer summer if ever there was one.
Around about August, the nice elderly lady across the street, noticing that on Sunday mornings Mom and I do not head out for the church down the road, even though I was a regular playmate with the minister's boy - he had a thousand toy cars and trucks on a nice square of dirt outside the back door- asks my Mom if she can take me to church. My Mom's name was Evelyn, and she says yes.
So off we go, and I suppose because it's summer, there is no Sunday school. I'm therefore on tap for the whole adult service, in a very full church. And they started to sing, all adult stuff of course, all those grand old hymns that built Upper Canada. My proxy grandmother hands me a hymn book and I join in.
Wow. Take that, Nova Scotia. I'm not just chirping, I'm in full roar, surrounded by grown ups and holding my own. Nobody was more surprised than myself. And no doubt my mother, who was a most attentive Mom in every sphere except church, was relieved to hear about my triumph when I got home. Probably the Eastern Passage thing had disturbed her much more than it had me, for she was a singer herself, occasionally in public, a sensitive soul who knew all about the negative effects of bad beginnings.
There was more in Ontario, too, as the months went by. But that is for later. What is for now is the sense of fitness in reconnecting with that part of my life, thanks to the current Premier's
swift reply.
Which reminds me that Nelson's first mayor, John Houston, came from Ontario.
And so did Nelson's first bishop. Martin Johnson was rector of Saint Michael's Cathedral, Toronto, before Rome carved the diocese of Nelson out of the Archdiocese of Vancouver, in 1936.
One wonders what he thinks of all this. I'm sure he has a very good view.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
gratitude
Anyone who gets anything out of the childhood reminiscence parts of this exercise should think gratefully of my wife. Her name is Shawn, named after the American male dance troop impresario. Shawn's mother had a co-natural relationship with the arts, perhaps the first older woman I ever met with such an attribute other than my teachers. She had attended both the University of British Columbia and Mills College, San Francisco, and went through elementary school with the nuns.
I have no memories of telling my own favourite childhood tales to the girls I met before Shawn. I probably did to a degree, being such a verbal type, but once I found my wife-to-be, there was a continual dialogue based on the adventures and misadventures of our mutual childhoods, and she began insisting quite early into this process that I write about my young life. This is a crucial sign of the right stuff that I recommend to every courting couple. She was particularly eager over an episode arising out of my family's time on an island in the north end of the Gulf of Georgia, just after the war, where I had met an eleven-year old girl who also liked to listen to my tales. From so much traveling about because of my soldier father, with so many different schools, I was hardly short of information.
Anyone grateful for the more adult material should be grateful to some few Vatican personalities, principally John Paul II, but by no means excluding the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Secretary of State for the so many troublesome years prior to the collapse of the Soviet system, and the present Pope, Benedict XVI, who was then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Doctrine. All three received letters from myself, beginning in 1983. By that time, after innumerable notes to various secular people that generally led nowhere, I found the Vatican the only place to get results from my style of epistle.
Ah, yes. I did write to Paul VI, in 1977, but he did not answer. Neither did all sorts of people.
As early as 1965, had I got a real response from a journalist, the entire pedophile problem might have sprung itself an earlier solution. The Holy Spirit was doing his part, but there were so many professions, in and outside the Church, which did not. Man, that took a lot of prayer, to get them up and running.
1964 was a good year, too. In some ways the best year of all. But God strutted his stuff in a diocese where the bishop was one of the worst of the protectors and, indeed, practitioners, and His whispers in the prophet's ear would not be heard by one of His own successors to the apostles. They almost put that successor in jail, eventually, but not quite. No matter. He's dead now, and in the place where God always puts those who betray the most essential stewardships. The prophet has been told, twice, and his ally once. Two or three, in My name, are witness enough.
Those who find themselves grateful for the music tips - yes, we will get back to them - have a lot of people to thank, but the chap I want to bring up now is the late well-known and much loved Alexander Ross, or Sandy. Very effective subsequently in Canadian journalistic circles, especially in and around Toronto, he was a late joiner at the Ubyssey in the academic year of 1953-54, but turn up he did, after the New Year, and thus my instrumental career began. I could refer to the ups and downs of my musical education between 42 and that fateful day in early January, and I probably actually will, where it is relevant to points of instruction, but we need confidence and the conviction of light at the end of the tunnel, so here goes.
It was a lovely sunny Friday afternoon. Early January, 1954. I had now put in my first semester in the halls and huts of that educational institution, UBC, that sprawled with perfect Fitzgeraldian leisure over the western half of Vancouver's Point Grey peninsula, and not only had I caught on with the formidably well-read staff of the university newspaper, but I had, by default of harmony among the senior staffers, been appointed to the editorial board. Canadian University Press Editor. My my. An easy job, scouting articles in other college organs that I deemed fit for general student interest, and a priceless opportunity to read what student life was like not only all over Canada, but on a few campuses in the United States. The Berkeley, California, paper came our way, for example, and when our northern coast was doing its rain thing, day after day, I pondered switching universities. But somehow I read of out-of-state fees, and thought otherwise. There was a real connection with the U of Cal at B. Their Golden Bears Rugby team and our Thunderbirds squared off every year over some cup whose name I have forgotten. My high school game had been rugby, and to walk by the local Grizzlies when they are practicing is an old man's occasion of a profoundly heart-felt distraction. Stop it, stop it , stop it. You're too old to play. My grade nine math teacher and rugby coach, Mr Chapman, must be in heaven, simply from the joy he created in my brain the day he sketched out on his blackboard the field positions of the players and announced the time and place of the first flyweight division tryouts.
But back to Sandy and the sunny Friday afternoon when I had cut an English class in an East Mall hut because I knew I would be unable to sit still. Our professor was a good teacher, one Dr John Creighton, who on an earlier rainy afternoon had produced a profound light in the lecture room by discussing the relation between the metaphysical poets and mysticism. But I had other instincts and proceeded on down to the basement at the north end of the Brock Hall in hopes of finding some fellow pubster similarly disengaged.
What I found was Sandy Ross, very much engaged in wailing the tar out of a ukulele. The entrance to the Pub offices was similar to a coal mine. There were a lot of tunnels, and several corners, or so it seemed, first gained by a full flight of stairs going down, and once I hit the bottom of the stairs, and turned 180 into the first hall, I could hear not only a voice - possibly singing "Five foot two, eyes of blue," but also chords on a fretted instrument. I'm sure I had heard of a ukulele, but nobody I knew played one, and as we did not have a television, I didn't get to watch Arthur Godfrey.
But Sandy certainly played a ukulele, one foot up on the U-desk, where they put the paper together three times a week. I had never seen him before, this stringy fellow with a build just like mine, and I had a sense that he was performing some sort of audition ritual. But I also realized that all this music, added to his voice, was simply the result of a few chords. His right hand strummed with folded matchbook, his left held this position for a bar or two, then changed, and so on, but only over a compass of three or four chords. Simplicity itself. I was sure I could do it equally as well.
Well, his audition carried, he was accepted into the ranks, and he went on to become the editor-in-chief of the Ubyssey, although without even thinking about it I guess I made him sweat, as long as he thought that post was my ambition. Nonsense. I had to put my best energies into my attempts at fiction. And fretted instruments. But he did tell me where to buy a ukulele. Western Music, on Seymour Street. Five bucks for a plastic uke in a cardboard box with an instruction booklet and a felt pick. And by that time, thanks to Sandy, I had learned the tuning notes for the four strings: "My dog has fleas."
I was immensely grateful, got on with it, and started applying the chords to the dozens of songs I already knew. But it should have been: "Five one three six". My God. All those college students, from the 20s, 30s, and following, and not a one that actually understood the rules of the Greeks. And they say that mankind has progressed.
I have no memories of telling my own favourite childhood tales to the girls I met before Shawn. I probably did to a degree, being such a verbal type, but once I found my wife-to-be, there was a continual dialogue based on the adventures and misadventures of our mutual childhoods, and she began insisting quite early into this process that I write about my young life. This is a crucial sign of the right stuff that I recommend to every courting couple. She was particularly eager over an episode arising out of my family's time on an island in the north end of the Gulf of Georgia, just after the war, where I had met an eleven-year old girl who also liked to listen to my tales. From so much traveling about because of my soldier father, with so many different schools, I was hardly short of information.
Anyone grateful for the more adult material should be grateful to some few Vatican personalities, principally John Paul II, but by no means excluding the late Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, Secretary of State for the so many troublesome years prior to the collapse of the Soviet system, and the present Pope, Benedict XVI, who was then Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Doctrine. All three received letters from myself, beginning in 1983. By that time, after innumerable notes to various secular people that generally led nowhere, I found the Vatican the only place to get results from my style of epistle.
Ah, yes. I did write to Paul VI, in 1977, but he did not answer. Neither did all sorts of people.
As early as 1965, had I got a real response from a journalist, the entire pedophile problem might have sprung itself an earlier solution. The Holy Spirit was doing his part, but there were so many professions, in and outside the Church, which did not. Man, that took a lot of prayer, to get them up and running.
1964 was a good year, too. In some ways the best year of all. But God strutted his stuff in a diocese where the bishop was one of the worst of the protectors and, indeed, practitioners, and His whispers in the prophet's ear would not be heard by one of His own successors to the apostles. They almost put that successor in jail, eventually, but not quite. No matter. He's dead now, and in the place where God always puts those who betray the most essential stewardships. The prophet has been told, twice, and his ally once. Two or three, in My name, are witness enough.
Those who find themselves grateful for the music tips - yes, we will get back to them - have a lot of people to thank, but the chap I want to bring up now is the late well-known and much loved Alexander Ross, or Sandy. Very effective subsequently in Canadian journalistic circles, especially in and around Toronto, he was a late joiner at the Ubyssey in the academic year of 1953-54, but turn up he did, after the New Year, and thus my instrumental career began. I could refer to the ups and downs of my musical education between 42 and that fateful day in early January, and I probably actually will, where it is relevant to points of instruction, but we need confidence and the conviction of light at the end of the tunnel, so here goes.
It was a lovely sunny Friday afternoon. Early January, 1954. I had now put in my first semester in the halls and huts of that educational institution, UBC, that sprawled with perfect Fitzgeraldian leisure over the western half of Vancouver's Point Grey peninsula, and not only had I caught on with the formidably well-read staff of the university newspaper, but I had, by default of harmony among the senior staffers, been appointed to the editorial board. Canadian University Press Editor. My my. An easy job, scouting articles in other college organs that I deemed fit for general student interest, and a priceless opportunity to read what student life was like not only all over Canada, but on a few campuses in the United States. The Berkeley, California, paper came our way, for example, and when our northern coast was doing its rain thing, day after day, I pondered switching universities. But somehow I read of out-of-state fees, and thought otherwise. There was a real connection with the U of Cal at B. Their Golden Bears Rugby team and our Thunderbirds squared off every year over some cup whose name I have forgotten. My high school game had been rugby, and to walk by the local Grizzlies when they are practicing is an old man's occasion of a profoundly heart-felt distraction. Stop it, stop it , stop it. You're too old to play. My grade nine math teacher and rugby coach, Mr Chapman, must be in heaven, simply from the joy he created in my brain the day he sketched out on his blackboard the field positions of the players and announced the time and place of the first flyweight division tryouts.
But back to Sandy and the sunny Friday afternoon when I had cut an English class in an East Mall hut because I knew I would be unable to sit still. Our professor was a good teacher, one Dr John Creighton, who on an earlier rainy afternoon had produced a profound light in the lecture room by discussing the relation between the metaphysical poets and mysticism. But I had other instincts and proceeded on down to the basement at the north end of the Brock Hall in hopes of finding some fellow pubster similarly disengaged.
What I found was Sandy Ross, very much engaged in wailing the tar out of a ukulele. The entrance to the Pub offices was similar to a coal mine. There were a lot of tunnels, and several corners, or so it seemed, first gained by a full flight of stairs going down, and once I hit the bottom of the stairs, and turned 180 into the first hall, I could hear not only a voice - possibly singing "Five foot two, eyes of blue," but also chords on a fretted instrument. I'm sure I had heard of a ukulele, but nobody I knew played one, and as we did not have a television, I didn't get to watch Arthur Godfrey.
But Sandy certainly played a ukulele, one foot up on the U-desk, where they put the paper together three times a week. I had never seen him before, this stringy fellow with a build just like mine, and I had a sense that he was performing some sort of audition ritual. But I also realized that all this music, added to his voice, was simply the result of a few chords. His right hand strummed with folded matchbook, his left held this position for a bar or two, then changed, and so on, but only over a compass of three or four chords. Simplicity itself. I was sure I could do it equally as well.
Well, his audition carried, he was accepted into the ranks, and he went on to become the editor-in-chief of the Ubyssey, although without even thinking about it I guess I made him sweat, as long as he thought that post was my ambition. Nonsense. I had to put my best energies into my attempts at fiction. And fretted instruments. But he did tell me where to buy a ukulele. Western Music, on Seymour Street. Five bucks for a plastic uke in a cardboard box with an instruction booklet and a felt pick. And by that time, thanks to Sandy, I had learned the tuning notes for the four strings: "My dog has fleas."
I was immensely grateful, got on with it, and started applying the chords to the dozens of songs I already knew. But it should have been: "Five one three six". My God. All those college students, from the 20s, 30s, and following, and not a one that actually understood the rules of the Greeks. And they say that mankind has progressed.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
back of the beginning
Actually, she of the mighty left hand is called Caitie. My secretary pointed this out to me. Correcting my mistakes is part of her job description. She does it kindly, accurately and often. She also has other skills in her own right, but most important of all, she is a nun in street clothes and a fellow contemplative. She has been an integral part of getting up this blog just as she has been an integral part of our family for just over four decades. Her name is Marianne, and she is very well known in The Vatican. In fact the popes and their staff send things to her rather more often than they send things to me. Thus is the power of secretaries, no doubt for good reason. Where was I? Ah, yes, Caitlin's name. It is important to get the names exactly right, my acquired skill at doing just that in music being such a major reason for offering these considerations, and I am put in mind of our recently retired bishop, who was well known for that enviable pastoral skill. What the right mental word is to philosophy, the correct name is to a human being and his or her relationship with others.
And the right mental word is critical to understanding, authority, and freedom in playing a musical instrument.
Yet in teaching rudiments to children and other beginners it is precisely the right mental words that have been left out, for almost five hundred years now, ever since Elias Nikolaus Ammerbach published his book on organ tablature and, as I understand it, established the custom, nay, rule, of not only assigning letter names to the notes but using those names as the introduction to musical studies. This was in 1560. Just as I spelled little Caitlin's name wrong, I had recently
been going about telling my tale and putting Ammerbach's invention a century later.
I only heard of this German musician a couple of years ago, when my secretary and computer coach googled up "piano fingering" on the Web and came up with a very nice little thesis by one Athina Fytika, part of her doctoral degree from Florida State University, at Talahassee. The university had generously set up the thesis for download, and believe me, we downloaded. I had only a few months before been told by the owner of the town music store that prior to the counterpoint era, more or less, keyboard players had only used three fingers, ignoring the thumb and the little finger.
The light had dawned mightily in my grinding mind, and it dawned again as I rifled through the thesis.
By this time I was getting closer and closer to realizing that the biggest problems facing the keyboard student were all numerical. The questions were numerical, and as long as you had five fingers on each hand, so were the answers. Forget the letters, forget all those puzzling books of scales and studies, and learn to count. How did five go into eight anyway?
I think it was at that point that I realized that the general answer to all this confusion had been under my nose all along. It reminded me of the opening paragraph of my novel, when one friend discovers the answer to another friend's dilemma. The answer was a young man with a specific skill who had been within their daily view, on the sprawling campus of the University of British Columbia, for four years. And the finding of him was not a little fluky, just like so many of my findings in music. At the very beginning of the Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us that all sciences must submit to a master science, on the way to demonstrating the supremacy of philosophy and theology, and uses as an example the rule of music by mathematics.
How could it be, I wondered, how I, fifty years a Thomist, had failed to see the most fundamental, necessary, implications of what the Greeks and the Medievals and the preRenaissance musicians all took for simple common sense? And now, as I was able to more and more solve my own problems, then those of my tiny band of students, I began to wonder how the sense of the numbers had been lost.
Now every harmony teacher, and most jazz men at least, can tell you that the numbers are still alive and well. Yes. The more I investigate, the better jazz man I become. But if there is one of these species of musician who starts his or her students with the numbers, I would like to know about it.
How well is it understood that children learn to count and measure before they know the alphabet? What infant does not know the difference between one candy and two?
So what does this have to do with my title for today's observations?
It was the spring of 1942. The Japanese had invaded Pearl Harbour. My mother and little brother and I were living in her mother's house in Vancouver, a bowshot from the mighty urban forest of Central Park.(My other grandparents lived only few blocks away, in Burnaby.) My poor Dad, who had joined up at the onset of the war, was an ack ack gunner defending the docks of London, terrified of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. His father, from his mining days in the Yukon and the Interior of British Columbia, knew a fellow miner become a farmer in the North Okanagan, just out of Falkland.
The farmer and his family very kindly took us in, and my father relaxed. I of course had a wonderful time, and it was then, in spite of my often wretchedly arrogant and patronizing sense of superiority over any poor sod who had not grown up in Vancouver, that I began to acquire my preference for smaller communities. I have lived for decades in a town which has never quite reached ten thousand souls.
But my mother was more of a city girl, and our quarters were not large, so we moved after some weeks into Falkland itself, with a family in a tidy little home and a huge garden. One morning as I was waking up to go to school, I heard music on the radio. Falkland then was famous for its gypsum mine and its rodeo - it is still famous for the rodeo - and the station ran to country and western. Right, both kinds, as the lady behind the bar said to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Was it just music, or was there also voice? If there was voice, I don't remember it. But I sure as hell remember the guitar lick, somebody flat picking all over the neck. I had already learned to sing because everybody in our family sang, especially on my mother's side, and sang well. And my grandfather and my dad played harmonica by ear. But nobody played guitar. I don't think I'd even seen one. Nor I had been introduced to the piano, although there was one in the Burnaby house. And my Nana, being Baptist at that point - before and after she was Anglican, having been born in Cockney London - might have thought the guitar was wicked.
But it was not, that sunny morning in May, wicked to me. It was ecstasy, and my poor little soul, like Hans Christian Anderson's little match girl looking through the window into a room she knew she could never enter, sobbed within for knowing I would never have a chance to do what that unknown Nashville picker made sound so easy.
So much for childhood certainties.
And the right mental word is critical to understanding, authority, and freedom in playing a musical instrument.
Yet in teaching rudiments to children and other beginners it is precisely the right mental words that have been left out, for almost five hundred years now, ever since Elias Nikolaus Ammerbach published his book on organ tablature and, as I understand it, established the custom, nay, rule, of not only assigning letter names to the notes but using those names as the introduction to musical studies. This was in 1560. Just as I spelled little Caitlin's name wrong, I had recently
been going about telling my tale and putting Ammerbach's invention a century later.
I only heard of this German musician a couple of years ago, when my secretary and computer coach googled up "piano fingering" on the Web and came up with a very nice little thesis by one Athina Fytika, part of her doctoral degree from Florida State University, at Talahassee. The university had generously set up the thesis for download, and believe me, we downloaded. I had only a few months before been told by the owner of the town music store that prior to the counterpoint era, more or less, keyboard players had only used three fingers, ignoring the thumb and the little finger.
The light had dawned mightily in my grinding mind, and it dawned again as I rifled through the thesis.
By this time I was getting closer and closer to realizing that the biggest problems facing the keyboard student were all numerical. The questions were numerical, and as long as you had five fingers on each hand, so were the answers. Forget the letters, forget all those puzzling books of scales and studies, and learn to count. How did five go into eight anyway?
I think it was at that point that I realized that the general answer to all this confusion had been under my nose all along. It reminded me of the opening paragraph of my novel, when one friend discovers the answer to another friend's dilemma. The answer was a young man with a specific skill who had been within their daily view, on the sprawling campus of the University of British Columbia, for four years. And the finding of him was not a little fluky, just like so many of my findings in music. At the very beginning of the Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us that all sciences must submit to a master science, on the way to demonstrating the supremacy of philosophy and theology, and uses as an example the rule of music by mathematics.
How could it be, I wondered, how I, fifty years a Thomist, had failed to see the most fundamental, necessary, implications of what the Greeks and the Medievals and the preRenaissance musicians all took for simple common sense? And now, as I was able to more and more solve my own problems, then those of my tiny band of students, I began to wonder how the sense of the numbers had been lost.
Now every harmony teacher, and most jazz men at least, can tell you that the numbers are still alive and well. Yes. The more I investigate, the better jazz man I become. But if there is one of these species of musician who starts his or her students with the numbers, I would like to know about it.
How well is it understood that children learn to count and measure before they know the alphabet? What infant does not know the difference between one candy and two?
So what does this have to do with my title for today's observations?
It was the spring of 1942. The Japanese had invaded Pearl Harbour. My mother and little brother and I were living in her mother's house in Vancouver, a bowshot from the mighty urban forest of Central Park.(My other grandparents lived only few blocks away, in Burnaby.) My poor Dad, who had joined up at the onset of the war, was an ack ack gunner defending the docks of London, terrified of a Japanese invasion of the West Coast. His father, from his mining days in the Yukon and the Interior of British Columbia, knew a fellow miner become a farmer in the North Okanagan, just out of Falkland.
The farmer and his family very kindly took us in, and my father relaxed. I of course had a wonderful time, and it was then, in spite of my often wretchedly arrogant and patronizing sense of superiority over any poor sod who had not grown up in Vancouver, that I began to acquire my preference for smaller communities. I have lived for decades in a town which has never quite reached ten thousand souls.
But my mother was more of a city girl, and our quarters were not large, so we moved after some weeks into Falkland itself, with a family in a tidy little home and a huge garden. One morning as I was waking up to go to school, I heard music on the radio. Falkland then was famous for its gypsum mine and its rodeo - it is still famous for the rodeo - and the station ran to country and western. Right, both kinds, as the lady behind the bar said to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Was it just music, or was there also voice? If there was voice, I don't remember it. But I sure as hell remember the guitar lick, somebody flat picking all over the neck. I had already learned to sing because everybody in our family sang, especially on my mother's side, and sang well. And my grandfather and my dad played harmonica by ear. But nobody played guitar. I don't think I'd even seen one. Nor I had been introduced to the piano, although there was one in the Burnaby house. And my Nana, being Baptist at that point - before and after she was Anglican, having been born in Cockney London - might have thought the guitar was wicked.
But it was not, that sunny morning in May, wicked to me. It was ecstasy, and my poor little soul, like Hans Christian Anderson's little match girl looking through the window into a room she knew she could never enter, sobbed within for knowing I would never have a chance to do what that unknown Nashville picker made sound so easy.
So much for childhood certainties.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
in the beginning
In the beginning, the still, small, voice said, "Go into the land of the Webfooted Ones, and create a Blog."
And so I went and did exactly this, with a lot of help, and the voice said, "It's about time." And I thought: Father Vincent McNabb, OP, was suspicious of technology, and even created farms in defiance of it, but he would have liked these machines.
They're as quiet as monks, they go universal - even into space? - and when you're preaching your sermon, you don't have to listen to anyone cough or snore.
Mind you, you can't hear them laugh, either. But no created situation is absolutely perfect, so we'll just be grateful for what we do have.
And so I went and did exactly this, with a lot of help, and the voice said, "It's about time." And I thought: Father Vincent McNabb, OP, was suspicious of technology, and even created farms in defiance of it, but he would have liked these machines.
They're as quiet as monks, they go universal - even into space? - and when you're preaching your sermon, you don't have to listen to anyone cough or snore.
Mind you, you can't hear them laugh, either. But no created situation is absolutely perfect, so we'll just be grateful for what we do have.
And speaking of perfection, I'd better make it clear at the off, as the English would say, that perfection is mainly what this string in the Net is all about, no matter how widely it ranges over, around, and through other topics. I mean spiritual perfection, of course, as it's the only kind of perfection I've really understood for decades, although there are some other kinds that might be discussed from time to time, and perfection in the process of teaching music is going to be discussed very soon.
I bring up perfection right away from hard experience. I don't want to get any readers interested under false pretences. Back in the late 70's,when I was slowly closing in on the right beginning for my first completed novel, "Contemplatives", I thought for a time that a chapter describing a deer hunt would get the reader's attention. And I was right, for the reader said, "It made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up."
But she also said, "And then you started to write all that stuff about theology and it was suddenly really boring."
Therefore, when I did settle into the real beginning, on Saint Patrick's Day, l980, I made sure there was no doubt about the heart of my theme and I right away brought up perfection, sanctity, and the transformation in Christ as described by the great Catholic mystics. Of course I lost all the readers who only wanted deer hunts and banjo riffs, but I kept all the readers whose opinion I was really concerned about, people who were either mystics to some degree, or thought they would like to know something about mysticism, especially Christian mysticism. The popular writing of the day has wandered far, not without merit, into the ideas of Eastern mysticism, even though, as it knows little of the Cross, it is unlikely able to play spiritual poker with a full deck.
I also wrote a lot about music and singing, although throughout the music parts - as distinguished from the singing, for this I also know a considerable amount - I was always a touch nervous, for I knew there was still so much about it that I did not understand. In fact it was not until a couple of years after I finished the book - it's as long as "War and Peace" -, in 1988, on the feast of Louis de Montfort, April 28, that by taking on my oldest granddaughter, aged six, that I began the real process of getting to what I know today and am about to discuss. In those days I could only chord a guitar or a banjo, and my left hand at the piano was a raucous pattern of octaves and fifths. My learned son called this "stride piano" and could list off the names of the inventors. It was good enough for parties, it was good enough for teaching the mechanics of singing, but it was impossible for little Anna's little hands.
Thus began the search for a method that would do two things at once: teach the student to play by ear and analysis and also to read music.
We were very successful very quickly. As a folksinger and one-time school teacher I knew lots of songs for children, and as Anna's parents took her to church, she knew a few hymns. In those days, in spite of the flood of garbage that modern Catholic hymn writers have been allowed to inflict on the liturgy, there was still some genuinely singable stuff around. (I admit that some of these creations are not too bad at a campfire but I refuse to believe they have any place at a liturgy, and as a mystic, I am rendered incapable, by the Holy Spirit, of singing them.) To make a long story short, I'll simply say that little Anna was so keen for my method that she had to be told to get off the piano bench on early Saturday mornings. Her parents wanted to sleep in.
And no rapped knuckles!
Her younger sister followed suit, and seemed to have the same kind of mind, for they both played thirds in two hands quite quickly. They were also learning to read music. You know, Leila Fletcher, etc. Around the books, I was always somewhat discontent, but you have to go there sometime.
But their father was sent to work l200 miles away, so class was over. Briefly. My next guinea pigs, again two young sisters, this time the children of my senior agent, had different mind sets. The younger especially, the incomparable Catie, had a left hand like Oscar Peterson. At age eight, she wanted to boogie on our big old Gerhard Heintzman, and not with thirds. This was the beginning of my understanding that counterpoint was the beginning of wisdom, although it was still to be some years before I could accurately distinguish between what the Bachs did and didn't understand.
Here endeth today's lesson.
I bring up perfection right away from hard experience. I don't want to get any readers interested under false pretences. Back in the late 70's,when I was slowly closing in on the right beginning for my first completed novel, "Contemplatives", I thought for a time that a chapter describing a deer hunt would get the reader's attention. And I was right, for the reader said, "It made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up."
But she also said, "And then you started to write all that stuff about theology and it was suddenly really boring."
Therefore, when I did settle into the real beginning, on Saint Patrick's Day, l980, I made sure there was no doubt about the heart of my theme and I right away brought up perfection, sanctity, and the transformation in Christ as described by the great Catholic mystics. Of course I lost all the readers who only wanted deer hunts and banjo riffs, but I kept all the readers whose opinion I was really concerned about, people who were either mystics to some degree, or thought they would like to know something about mysticism, especially Christian mysticism. The popular writing of the day has wandered far, not without merit, into the ideas of Eastern mysticism, even though, as it knows little of the Cross, it is unlikely able to play spiritual poker with a full deck.
I also wrote a lot about music and singing, although throughout the music parts - as distinguished from the singing, for this I also know a considerable amount - I was always a touch nervous, for I knew there was still so much about it that I did not understand. In fact it was not until a couple of years after I finished the book - it's as long as "War and Peace" -, in 1988, on the feast of Louis de Montfort, April 28, that by taking on my oldest granddaughter, aged six, that I began the real process of getting to what I know today and am about to discuss. In those days I could only chord a guitar or a banjo, and my left hand at the piano was a raucous pattern of octaves and fifths. My learned son called this "stride piano" and could list off the names of the inventors. It was good enough for parties, it was good enough for teaching the mechanics of singing, but it was impossible for little Anna's little hands.
Thus began the search for a method that would do two things at once: teach the student to play by ear and analysis and also to read music.
We were very successful very quickly. As a folksinger and one-time school teacher I knew lots of songs for children, and as Anna's parents took her to church, she knew a few hymns. In those days, in spite of the flood of garbage that modern Catholic hymn writers have been allowed to inflict on the liturgy, there was still some genuinely singable stuff around. (I admit that some of these creations are not too bad at a campfire but I refuse to believe they have any place at a liturgy, and as a mystic, I am rendered incapable, by the Holy Spirit, of singing them.) To make a long story short, I'll simply say that little Anna was so keen for my method that she had to be told to get off the piano bench on early Saturday mornings. Her parents wanted to sleep in.
And no rapped knuckles!
Her younger sister followed suit, and seemed to have the same kind of mind, for they both played thirds in two hands quite quickly. They were also learning to read music. You know, Leila Fletcher, etc. Around the books, I was always somewhat discontent, but you have to go there sometime.
But their father was sent to work l200 miles away, so class was over. Briefly. My next guinea pigs, again two young sisters, this time the children of my senior agent, had different mind sets. The younger especially, the incomparable Catie, had a left hand like Oscar Peterson. At age eight, she wanted to boogie on our big old Gerhard Heintzman, and not with thirds. This was the beginning of my understanding that counterpoint was the beginning of wisdom, although it was still to be some years before I could accurately distinguish between what the Bachs did and didn't understand.
Here endeth today's lesson.
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