It's a wise man who knows his own muscles, especially those so crucial to full motion, by walking, running, or dancing; and full rest, by sitting.
Unfortunately, it's taken me a very long time to come anywhere near a full knowledge of the muscles and nerves that govern those uses of my anatomy, especially when it comes to stretching, as essential as that should be from the beginnings of physical education, and it's downright humiliating to realize that the errors are so simply overcome, that the secrets are so natural and easily teachable. And it's all but infuriating to realize that this most fundamental piece of physiological wisdom has need neither of a sophisticated gym or fitness centre nor a yoga studio, especially when it comes to the piriformis and the three gluteals, all of which, although they are a full leg's length away from the feet, nonetheless seem to affect their efficiency. The body, as divisible as it may be to a surgeon, insists on functioning as a single unit.
All you really need for this overhaul is a good armchair - or couch-potato's sofa - and a good book or DVD. Or even a CD and a glass of beer!
Long before I was old enough to drink beer, I had both the chair and the book, and the sweetest little perfectly elastic LEFT piriformis in the Western Hemisphere. I almost never had to spend any time sitting at table or desk, hunched over my homework sitting in a straight-backed chair with my feet flat on the floor and getting hardly any stretch anywhere. After a late afternoon full of exercise of one form or another, with perhaps a bit of after-supper cavorting thrown in, I invariably read for an hour or so, sitting in the family living room, with my left leg crossed over my right. Thus, lots of stretch for the left piriformis, the left glutes, even the left quads and hamstrings. God and Nature's gift to the juvenile bookworm and future philosopher. Absolutely lovely, as far as it went.
But of course it went only half-way, and not the more stressed half at that. My right leg was forever busy blasting away at a soccer ball, a football, pushing off the bases, propelling my side of the scrum, and was probably the principal power leg on my bike, or chopping wood, or propelling pucks or tennis balls.
There was of course no yoga in the schools in those days, or even on the racks with the other sports magazines, nor in school or public libraries, at least in the youth sections. So I grew up with a very tight right knee, and all sorts of annoyances in my right hip and right lower back. There was indeed a medical problem in my lower vertebrae, as I have mentioned, but it was not the whole story, as learning of the pelvic tilt has demonstrated.
And when I did start to take up a little yoga, forty years ago, I gathered no clues as to how to deal with my personal ignorance, nor, I am quite sure, would I have come upon yoga teachers sensible enough to show me the solution I have now. The East, like the West, has so many ways of being unable to penetrate to the real epicentre of the problem. One of the largest studios I know of locally simply refuses to use any props, for example, and probably would not allow an easy chair to even be classified as a prop. I asked once about props, got a rather closed look and verbal response, so I did not go on to any questions about mattress yoga. And that is interesting, because I instinctively knew to do calf stretches in bed as soon as I started running, and for a couple of years or more Shawn has been instinctively employing the kind of hip stretches that work both the piriformis and the glutes while sits up in bed in the mornings reading her breviary. This is by no means the first time my wife had made me feel like an idiot.
I also have always crossed my legs at the ankles when lying in bed, or sitting up to read, and I realized this morning that as simple and comforting a posture as this - a little extra gentle stress when sitting up - registers precisely on the top of the femur, the greater trochanter, where the piriformis inserts. To make it really hum, I further discovered, just this morning to my shame, that if you cross the legs at the KNEES it works so beautifully it just about makes you cry. The more you work at physical conditioning, the more you realize that the fast food approach is only damaging, and the real genius is in any strategy that can extend stress time gently.
All this sudden clarification has happened, as surprising discoveries so often do, from an accidental event. My skateboard shoes, my totally flat heel boarders, unbeknown to me as shoe style until my little grandson came to stay with us six years ago, had finally started to wear down around the heels. Shawn took them, along with a pair of her own shoes to our neighbour repairman, who to my surprise said he could do something. (I had assumed I'd simply have to buy a new pair.) While the boarders were in the shop, I took the life of my left ankle into the battle zone and set out for a long walk in my dear old brogues, which, in an act of faith in the future, had been recently re-heeled. Just in case, I put my dojo shoes in a small pack. It was only several months ago that even a short ramble in the oxfords had caused problems.
But, lo and behold, almost five miles later, the dojos were still in the pack, and my ankle was registering no appreciable discomfort, aside from the simple fact of its being the more collapsed of the two, both in need of Birkenstock inserts. Miracle, plus a determined attempt at prognosis. What had I recently been doing right?
Two months of early morning dancing had probably helped. (Still Emmylou, then changed to the Robert Plant and Allison Kraus Grammy winner we picked up last year. It'll probably be Doc Watson next.) This caper is the keeper for weight control, by the way, as far as I'm concerned. A minimum of impact on the joints, a maximum of inspiration to get you up and at it. The ever vigilant Divine Personal Trainer had been suddenly stingy about the rowing and running. Another source of input was better stretches for both dancing and my much reduced rowing schedule, principally the more regular use of the split child pose. (Only one leg folded, the other straight. This one is also good for reading, as long as you keep your back as low as possible.)
But I think the primary source of the new, improved, ankle came along about a month ago when MT and I fell into looking up the piriformis in the Trigger Point Therapy Workbook by Clair Davies. A great deal of new light broke through, thanks to the fullness and clarity of the discussion therein, and also as a result of my finally being able to unite negative experience with recovering techniques.
To be frank, I had not paid very much attention to the piriformis. I knew it was one of the six or seven interior, or deep, pelvic muscles concerned with hip rotation, but I had no sense whatsoever of it being something of a lone gun, operating because of its peculiar location, as an indicator as well as a governor of correct procedures. Or, incorrect, as in my case, because, literally for some years, I've had so much mildish irritation around my left trochanter that I quite regularly, and quite sadly, had to ponder the possibility of a plastic hip. After all, the right had been the irritating side, which I had been used to for decades, so what else could the left promise?
Yet when I actually spoke, quite recently, with someone who had undergone a hip replacement, and he described the very considerable pain that he'd had to live with previously, I was sure my problem was not the same. But what was I dealing with?
Ironically, thanks to my respect for hatha yoga, I was dealing with the simple fact that my attempts at across legged sitting, or the Tailor Position, while they had been good for some things, were not going to solve the problem, which in fact, on a fifty-percent basis, I had known the solution for, all my life.
In my grand success at solving to a considerable, although not yet complete, degree, the ancient and annoying tightness of the right side from my lower back to my knee, I had pretty much neglected the left, almost never falling back on the old youthful happiness of crossing my left leg over my right knee when I sat down for a nice, long, utterly therapeutic, session of reading, reflecting, watching a BBC detective series, or simply drinking a beer. But with the right side coming along nicely, and myself rigidly in favour of balance in all things, I had sensed a need to equalize the left.
And then my beloved boarders showed signs of needing some TLC, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Had I suffered from the inspiration to study more guitar smarts, I might have left myself in better shape in this regard, but the pressure to grasp the keyboard has been nothing if not rampant. It is not a little significant that with the keyboard pretty much in hand - has anyone out there solved the mantra riddle yet? - I have returned a little more determinedly to my first love, even thinking kindly of beginners' chords - and if the mood keeps up, the left piro and glutes will indeed acquire all the bounce of a lacrosse ball. (That was one sport I did not play, but I've always admired the remarkable bouncing ability of the ball the players pay so much attention to.)
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
353646: The Mantra
That's how it came, early yesterday morning, just after I'd woken up at 4, after the first decent sleep in that many nights, thanks to a rousing bout of flu, cough, and cold that had me sneezing like a ruptured steam boiler. I was so sick I'd had to cancel my Monday morning with the great McDaniel, and let him go off to the ski hill, yet I had managed to sit to the piano stool for regular, very short, intervals, and keep plugging at my instinct that the mother lode of it was not too far from the end of my shovel. A wee advance, a definite set back - something missing in finger dexterity, accurate finger stretching, digital comprehension, all stemming from yet another instance of a correct general concept cluttered up by the lack of sufficient small steps to achieve its execution gracefully. I'm finally closing in, you see, on the four-note chord studies - in each hand - that should make skillful reading child's play - and variations even easier - and I've been finding the numbers absolute to comprehension, but I'd yet to salt away the routine that would make the student quickly almost too confident to endure. (You know how kids get.) I was close, but not quite the cigar. (I learned that one from my youngest, the other blogger, but long before she could handle a blog.)
And then it came, very early in the morning, very quickly after I started up the mental arithmetic, but this time in an unusually well-protected interior landscape. The devil had not even had a moment for any of his usual dirty work at the wake-up cross-roads.
353646. That's all it is. So little, and yet so significant, once you get hold of how to read it. The devil that loves to confuse and discourage students has been thrashing ever since, like a crocodile with a pit bull clamped to his tail.
I still get a little nervous when I type it in, which I've already done several times for a number of people, some extremely well placed, others extremely knowledgeable, or both. Can it really be that easy? So easy and useful and infallibly effective to explain, yet so mysterious if you don't have a clue?
I must admit that I've always wondered what I would do when I finally got to the end of the journey, in terms of making the final clues, whenever I found them, as plain as the sums in a math primer. Obviously, going by the other blogs, they're fodder for fiction. But there's a lot else that's fodder for fiction in those blogs, and the technical information has to find its way in through the natural movements of the characters, unfolding day by day, as have these discoveries. It's been the longest detective story I ever heard of. At adoration of the blessed sacrament in our recently refurbished rectory chapel the other day I was explaining to a lady some of the history of the three stained glass windows that were installed a few months ago, and the coincidence of this event. Her father-in-law, in Slovenia, was a professional organist, and teacher. The windows are from the old Saint Joseph's convent chapel, from the days when the teaching nuns and boarding students lived there, and even after the top floor of the convent school was closed as a residence by the fire marshall, the chapel was used for school events. Our trio sang "Me and My Uncle", for some students in there, along with other folk songs, and the stained glass windows kept me company while I banged away on the chapel piano, always trying to solve the questions that when answered would lead to reading. That was in 1967. A few years later the old school was torn down and a new one built, but the windows were preserved, by one Tam Shields, who had been trained in the stained glass craft in Glasgow, where he was also sometime back-up goalie for the Celtics, and stored on church property against the happy day of their re-employment. Thus they were company in early days of research, and now they smile on me again as I conclude.
Not that I'm ready to perform in Carnegie Hall, or even lead the hymns in Eton chapel (this morning I Googled that school's incredible music programme) but I sure as hell please myself with all the drills, finally being able to put together all the other patterns and pedagogical concepts I've realized over this educational saga., and thus make the music and arrangements that move me the most. Beauty, like charity, begins at home.
353646 Think about it. I wonder if there is a lad at Eton who could deliver me a good essay. He would need to appreciate what Socrates said about the heart of education, and unlike me, he is probably able to read all about that in Greek.
And then it came, very early in the morning, very quickly after I started up the mental arithmetic, but this time in an unusually well-protected interior landscape. The devil had not even had a moment for any of his usual dirty work at the wake-up cross-roads.
353646. That's all it is. So little, and yet so significant, once you get hold of how to read it. The devil that loves to confuse and discourage students has been thrashing ever since, like a crocodile with a pit bull clamped to his tail.
I still get a little nervous when I type it in, which I've already done several times for a number of people, some extremely well placed, others extremely knowledgeable, or both. Can it really be that easy? So easy and useful and infallibly effective to explain, yet so mysterious if you don't have a clue?
I must admit that I've always wondered what I would do when I finally got to the end of the journey, in terms of making the final clues, whenever I found them, as plain as the sums in a math primer. Obviously, going by the other blogs, they're fodder for fiction. But there's a lot else that's fodder for fiction in those blogs, and the technical information has to find its way in through the natural movements of the characters, unfolding day by day, as have these discoveries. It's been the longest detective story I ever heard of. At adoration of the blessed sacrament in our recently refurbished rectory chapel the other day I was explaining to a lady some of the history of the three stained glass windows that were installed a few months ago, and the coincidence of this event. Her father-in-law, in Slovenia, was a professional organist, and teacher. The windows are from the old Saint Joseph's convent chapel, from the days when the teaching nuns and boarding students lived there, and even after the top floor of the convent school was closed as a residence by the fire marshall, the chapel was used for school events. Our trio sang "Me and My Uncle", for some students in there, along with other folk songs, and the stained glass windows kept me company while I banged away on the chapel piano, always trying to solve the questions that when answered would lead to reading. That was in 1967. A few years later the old school was torn down and a new one built, but the windows were preserved, by one Tam Shields, who had been trained in the stained glass craft in Glasgow, where he was also sometime back-up goalie for the Celtics, and stored on church property against the happy day of their re-employment. Thus they were company in early days of research, and now they smile on me again as I conclude.
Not that I'm ready to perform in Carnegie Hall, or even lead the hymns in Eton chapel (this morning I Googled that school's incredible music programme) but I sure as hell please myself with all the drills, finally being able to put together all the other patterns and pedagogical concepts I've realized over this educational saga., and thus make the music and arrangements that move me the most. Beauty, like charity, begins at home.
353646 Think about it. I wonder if there is a lad at Eton who could deliver me a good essay. He would need to appreciate what Socrates said about the heart of education, and unlike me, he is probably able to read all about that in Greek.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Novel Alert
It was back in 91 or so that the thought on which I was allowed to lift my prayerfully immobilized bones out of bed, some considerable time before the dawn, was this, from the usual source: "If I wanted you to do it, I could have you working on four books at once."
At that time, if I remember correctly, I already had more than one book on the go, yet there was a certain sense of precision to the statement that only comes clear now, thanks to the Net, Blogger, and, as always, the amazing technical skills of MT. In the last ten days she has not only transferred the entire text of Not Without The Angels to a more pleasing format but also unearthed the twelve chapters of The Yacht, my story most concerned with music instruction, heretofore buried in Microsoft Word on the old computer, and set it up on the Ranger list. (Mind you, The Yacht does not yet connect with Sitemeter, but this does not interfere with readership, only with the author's awareness of whose reading it. No life can be truly full which does not include a little mystery.)
So now, I work away at four distinct undertakings in print. While I have not been discontent with less, previously, daily wondering gratefully at the available technology, I must confess that the foursome does give me a definite sense of fullness, and I think brings with it an added sense of leisure. Writing well is inevitably an anxious business, and anything that will tone down the stress must be welcome. The goal, I think, is to be able to feel, writing your own stuff, as you feel, reading Jane Austen. (At the moment on Emma, and in general on course with the entire canon, film and book, since the middle of Advent, as it is the perfect material for the moment in a faith community run ragged by the sort of undisciplined imaginations Jane is so good at exposing. I said as much to our bishop, over a cup of tea in my living room.)
The timing is not unprovidential, nor contrary to gradual, and eminently mysterious, unfolding of my grasp of music theory and technique. Although I had an extremely good time with the first dozen chapters of The Yacht, and although they admittedly contain a mass of music instruction that must daunt any reader, and probably dismiss the faint-hearted, in spite of my every effort to make the logical as plain as possible, they still lacked certain essentials, certain fundamentals of the art of teaching anyone without previous instruction, yet possessed of a working ear and a grasp of the common sense of arithmetic, especially when it came to uniting fingers, sound, and the printed staves with all those funny little black marks that look so undecipherable.
A long time ago the Lord said to me: "It's my book, and I market it how I like." In those days, I assumed he was only talking about my first novel, as I had no idea of creating a music text that stood by itself, although I was putting a lot of music instruction into my fiction. Jacob Cameron was not for idle chatter the adopted grandson of Philippe Gagnon, whose understanding of all sorts of music was as close to incomparable as one could get. But of course the Lord always means more than he seems to at first hearing.
I have to admit that I enjoyed re-reading chapter twelve of The Yacht, where I had left off many months ago, and had only to do a little editing before I felt I could release the story on the Net. I also must admit that once I had come up with the two immediately previous posts on the channel at hand, I began to wonder if that was it for using the Ranger for so much music instruction, as Yacht had been precisely designed for that purpose, initially inspired after discovering an utter rocket of a keyboard drill featuring right hand triads and left hand octaves, all put together to deal with all the possibilities of those associations in logical a dramatic order, somewhat in the style of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, except for the ease which should go with any sensible scale study. This was all very well at the time, and good for a chapter that generally had a positive effect on those good enough to read it for me, but it certainly did not unlock the secrets of a truly comfortable study of four-part harmony and reading skills.
But this last is pretty much done now, at least to the point where I can give the next section of the book the precision it has been waiting for. So, there's a dozen chapters of the tale, here comes the rest of the lessons, and there are enough interesting signs out there in the real world to indicate that the entertainment community might just be capable of waking up, eventually.
At that time, if I remember correctly, I already had more than one book on the go, yet there was a certain sense of precision to the statement that only comes clear now, thanks to the Net, Blogger, and, as always, the amazing technical skills of MT. In the last ten days she has not only transferred the entire text of Not Without The Angels to a more pleasing format but also unearthed the twelve chapters of The Yacht, my story most concerned with music instruction, heretofore buried in Microsoft Word on the old computer, and set it up on the Ranger list. (Mind you, The Yacht does not yet connect with Sitemeter, but this does not interfere with readership, only with the author's awareness of whose reading it. No life can be truly full which does not include a little mystery.)
So now, I work away at four distinct undertakings in print. While I have not been discontent with less, previously, daily wondering gratefully at the available technology, I must confess that the foursome does give me a definite sense of fullness, and I think brings with it an added sense of leisure. Writing well is inevitably an anxious business, and anything that will tone down the stress must be welcome. The goal, I think, is to be able to feel, writing your own stuff, as you feel, reading Jane Austen. (At the moment on Emma, and in general on course with the entire canon, film and book, since the middle of Advent, as it is the perfect material for the moment in a faith community run ragged by the sort of undisciplined imaginations Jane is so good at exposing. I said as much to our bishop, over a cup of tea in my living room.)
The timing is not unprovidential, nor contrary to gradual, and eminently mysterious, unfolding of my grasp of music theory and technique. Although I had an extremely good time with the first dozen chapters of The Yacht, and although they admittedly contain a mass of music instruction that must daunt any reader, and probably dismiss the faint-hearted, in spite of my every effort to make the logical as plain as possible, they still lacked certain essentials, certain fundamentals of the art of teaching anyone without previous instruction, yet possessed of a working ear and a grasp of the common sense of arithmetic, especially when it came to uniting fingers, sound, and the printed staves with all those funny little black marks that look so undecipherable.
A long time ago the Lord said to me: "It's my book, and I market it how I like." In those days, I assumed he was only talking about my first novel, as I had no idea of creating a music text that stood by itself, although I was putting a lot of music instruction into my fiction. Jacob Cameron was not for idle chatter the adopted grandson of Philippe Gagnon, whose understanding of all sorts of music was as close to incomparable as one could get. But of course the Lord always means more than he seems to at first hearing.
I have to admit that I enjoyed re-reading chapter twelve of The Yacht, where I had left off many months ago, and had only to do a little editing before I felt I could release the story on the Net. I also must admit that once I had come up with the two immediately previous posts on the channel at hand, I began to wonder if that was it for using the Ranger for so much music instruction, as Yacht had been precisely designed for that purpose, initially inspired after discovering an utter rocket of a keyboard drill featuring right hand triads and left hand octaves, all put together to deal with all the possibilities of those associations in logical a dramatic order, somewhat in the style of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, except for the ease which should go with any sensible scale study. This was all very well at the time, and good for a chapter that generally had a positive effect on those good enough to read it for me, but it certainly did not unlock the secrets of a truly comfortable study of four-part harmony and reading skills.
But this last is pretty much done now, at least to the point where I can give the next section of the book the precision it has been waiting for. So, there's a dozen chapters of the tale, here comes the rest of the lessons, and there are enough interesting signs out there in the real world to indicate that the entertainment community might just be capable of waking up, eventually.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Mary Christmas, Keyboarders
How come Mary instead of Merry?
Because the most recent stop on this long and complicated journey to get to music fundamentals that every child should and can know came through Gregorian Chant Mass IX, traditionally the mass used to celebrate a feast dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In my early years in the Church, before everybody got so busy either misinterpreting or downright disobeying Vatican Two, while I did chant quite steadily, it was usually Mass VIII, that of the angels, at least the Kyrie of which was not in old mode D. This was good as far as it went, and infinitely better than all that slop written by second rate priests on fourth rate guitars, but it was by no means old mode D, which was created in the mind of the Eternal from way back, and might even lead to the conversion of Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, etc, once they realize how it cranks a Stratocaster into outer space, right up there with the angels, their boss of the feminine version, and the Face everybody both longs to see and is afraid just might show up. Grace builds on nature, as Saint Thomas was always saying, and there's nothing more natural than old mode D, especially on a git-fiddle. I haven't had time to sort it out on the 5-string yet, but we'll probably get there.
The funny thing was, Santa's little helper in all this discovery was something of an old enemy, that is, just one more publisher who wouldn't publish my novel, and was none too bright about it. But as Augustine says, the guy you let you down today just might be the guy with the helping hand tomorrow.
Ignatius started off well, with us. In 1985, they published The Ratzinger Report, a modest little volume that did many things for my piece of mind, but the principle effect of which was to reassure me that John Paul's theological alter ego was good at his job - running the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith - and had few illusions about the idiot factor so rife in the Church. But when Ignatius couldn't grasp the obvious significance of Contemplatives I had to write them off with that old bromide that superintendents of schools use to mercifully identify a none too effective teacher: "Works well under supervision."
But then in 1997 they worked very well indeed, and certainly without any supervision of me, in an area for which I was most unqualified, when they brought out Adoremus, the parish hymnal that contains all sorts of chant - although no Latin Credos - all nicely laid out in a mere three parts, making life all that much easier for the beginner. The ancient melody, from the days of no accompaniment, no harmonies, in the treble stave, with fairly simple two voice arrangements in the bass. This ordering of the notes was not original with the publisher, as I thought too gratefully at first, but was simply in line with the original practice, as was proved by photographs from old manuscripts in a book Marianne ordered, concerning the legendary Monsignor Richard Schuler.
Nonetheless, perhaps with the interfering aid of the Muse's finger, I found the two-voices not to my taste, and then came out of my agonies with the realization that I should create a predictable, musically logical, schedule of two voices, that would do for numbers practice - eventually solfage practice - in every key. It is, after all, the fingers, not the eyes, that make the actual sounds.
I have given this for guitar, in my mind at least in old D mode with a dropped 6th string. Here it is for keyboard. I would recommend the initial run in C major. I write it for two octaves, with the single right hand finger, preferably 3, ranging from tonic to tonic. It comes first with the smaller intervals in the left hand, 3rds and 4ths, and then with the larger, 5ths and 6ths.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 1 e above small c = 3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 small c = 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 e above small c = 3
5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 g below small c = 5
The second schedule provides the richer sound, of course, because it creates real triads, not modified triads like the first schedule. But it is naturally harder to grasp, because the melody is hidden in the left hand. I`ve been quite close to it for years, but never so precisely as now, never so able to use it for initial reading studies, never so flooding my thoughts with images of a cathedral organ using real music theory to bring the congregation back to its senses, in the way that only chant can do.
If there are any gainsayers left out there they should be advised that the angel Gabriel was big around here last week. That`s the fellow on trumpet.
When you get good at alternating on these patterns, from the small to the large intervals and back again, you`re close to reading.
Because the most recent stop on this long and complicated journey to get to music fundamentals that every child should and can know came through Gregorian Chant Mass IX, traditionally the mass used to celebrate a feast dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In my early years in the Church, before everybody got so busy either misinterpreting or downright disobeying Vatican Two, while I did chant quite steadily, it was usually Mass VIII, that of the angels, at least the Kyrie of which was not in old mode D. This was good as far as it went, and infinitely better than all that slop written by second rate priests on fourth rate guitars, but it was by no means old mode D, which was created in the mind of the Eternal from way back, and might even lead to the conversion of Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, etc, once they realize how it cranks a Stratocaster into outer space, right up there with the angels, their boss of the feminine version, and the Face everybody both longs to see and is afraid just might show up. Grace builds on nature, as Saint Thomas was always saying, and there's nothing more natural than old mode D, especially on a git-fiddle. I haven't had time to sort it out on the 5-string yet, but we'll probably get there.
The funny thing was, Santa's little helper in all this discovery was something of an old enemy, that is, just one more publisher who wouldn't publish my novel, and was none too bright about it. But as Augustine says, the guy you let you down today just might be the guy with the helping hand tomorrow.
Ignatius started off well, with us. In 1985, they published The Ratzinger Report, a modest little volume that did many things for my piece of mind, but the principle effect of which was to reassure me that John Paul's theological alter ego was good at his job - running the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith - and had few illusions about the idiot factor so rife in the Church. But when Ignatius couldn't grasp the obvious significance of Contemplatives I had to write them off with that old bromide that superintendents of schools use to mercifully identify a none too effective teacher: "Works well under supervision."
But then in 1997 they worked very well indeed, and certainly without any supervision of me, in an area for which I was most unqualified, when they brought out Adoremus, the parish hymnal that contains all sorts of chant - although no Latin Credos - all nicely laid out in a mere three parts, making life all that much easier for the beginner. The ancient melody, from the days of no accompaniment, no harmonies, in the treble stave, with fairly simple two voice arrangements in the bass. This ordering of the notes was not original with the publisher, as I thought too gratefully at first, but was simply in line with the original practice, as was proved by photographs from old manuscripts in a book Marianne ordered, concerning the legendary Monsignor Richard Schuler.
Nonetheless, perhaps with the interfering aid of the Muse's finger, I found the two-voices not to my taste, and then came out of my agonies with the realization that I should create a predictable, musically logical, schedule of two voices, that would do for numbers practice - eventually solfage practice - in every key. It is, after all, the fingers, not the eyes, that make the actual sounds.
I have given this for guitar, in my mind at least in old D mode with a dropped 6th string. Here it is for keyboard. I would recommend the initial run in C major. I write it for two octaves, with the single right hand finger, preferably 3, ranging from tonic to tonic. It comes first with the smaller intervals in the left hand, 3rds and 4ths, and then with the larger, 5ths and 6ths.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 1 e above small c = 3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 small c = 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 e above small c = 3
5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 g below small c = 5
The second schedule provides the richer sound, of course, because it creates real triads, not modified triads like the first schedule. But it is naturally harder to grasp, because the melody is hidden in the left hand. I`ve been quite close to it for years, but never so precisely as now, never so able to use it for initial reading studies, never so flooding my thoughts with images of a cathedral organ using real music theory to bring the congregation back to its senses, in the way that only chant can do.
If there are any gainsayers left out there they should be advised that the angel Gabriel was big around here last week. That`s the fellow on trumpet.
When you get good at alternating on these patterns, from the small to the large intervals and back again, you`re close to reading.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Mary Christmas, Rockers
I suspect this is going to be a long one, sort of a novella unto itself, and done in chunks, like morning around the Christmas tree, with one present after another to open. On that occasion, in my trinitarian household, we always have breakfast first, and make sure there's lots of coffee, and of course my coffee always get laced with brandy or single malt. It was the same when we were happily stocked with six children
Another familiar image to keep in mind is the school teacher's blackboard, with plenty of chalk, an eraser for the inevitable mistakes that seem to come when a newly discovered doctrine is being exposed for the first time, a good old fashioned pointer for whacking on the board to wake up the nodding heads, or to point out the essential stepping stones in the crossing of the troubled and confusing stream known as music theory.
The tree, in this case, is the old fashioned D Mode, the one they used for a couple of thousand years, possibly, before someone thought of adding the Bflat, the first of the accidentals. It went like this, for a simple octave only:
D E F G A B C D
That's right, no Bflat. This means that the second half-tone comes between the B and the C, or, in the all essential numbers that no publisher other than myself seems to know how to think about, 6 and 7.
So let's have all the numbers, for just an octave, for now.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 ( This one is also known as 8.)
Furthermore, to make the schema complete, and also to smack the crap out of the tradition of the theoretical foundations of the thinking of the Teutons and their offspring - English, Dutch, Scandahoovian, etc., let's bring up solfage.
Re Me Fa So Lah Te Do Re (I give the lah an 'h' for future reference.)
Now, any really good music school will teach you all three of these names, but I'm not so sure that such music schools exist more than in theory. In my long life around music I'm the only teacher I know who has the common sense - a very favourite term of Thomas Aquinas - to start absolutely with numbers, especially in instrumental studies, and I've no history at all of leadership that has anything to do with music wheeling out the incredible dynamics of an individual or a group waltzing around with enormous effect with the syllables of solfage, when it comes to vocal instruction. It's as if Guido D'Arrezo never existed, and everyone's forgotten the story of how his fellow monks hated his guts and only the Pope of the day was able to see the light and shut their goddamn mouths, and thus put the icing on the cake that was Gregorian, at least until the polyphonists created their own versions of chaos and confusion, and lost the body of the one really important choir, the people in the pews. Nothing ever really changes, right? Christ is forever having to put the Sanhedrin in its place.
This doesn't mean that I don't like great choral music. God forbid. Everyone knows that such a creation provides an enormous sense of the choirs of heaven, of there really existing such a community as the angels, especially for those who cannot read Saint Thomas on the same subject and only get the buzz through music. But what I really love is to hear an ordinary congregation, led by a good voice or two, getting all that love, grace, salvation, and perhaps even a taste of perfection, out of the ordinary food of the mass, Gregorian Chant. Nothing else can bring the Holy Spirit so fully, so evident.
The following, by the way, works on anything, especially an organ keyboard, but what I have in mind this morning, following the nifty practices of the last couple of days, is the guitar.
1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5
5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3
1 1 5 1 5 1 1 1 1 5 1 5 1
Now, goddammit, and beating the shit out of the blackboard, get it in your imbecile head, that it is the MIDDLE line that leads the way, and that, on the guitar, is in the MIDDLE of the instrument. The 5, happily, is the fifth string, the A, open. And the 6, the 7, and the 1 continue on the same string. Only a fool, such as I was in my chords-only early days, jumps immediately to a higher string. The docile student will do well to work on just this scale, dividing it into its logical numeric parts: 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3; 3,4,5; 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3. This simple bit of common sense and humility, as opposed to the incredibly-idiotic-because-mentally-stultifying-whole-scale-method-of-interpretration, will make a Clapton or a Knopfler of the beginner more quickly than even Johann Sebastian Bach or Carlos Montoya could imagine.
In this schema, for the moment, one never even gets to the First string. Don't worry. It becomes useful, especially in the higher modes. Musicians always have to learn how to make the middle of the scales sound interesting. (Especially when they're singers.)
The upper line is, of course, the harmony. Just thirds, with the odd fourth. How simple, how neglected, like a lot of simple things. And I would recommend getting a good handle on just this basic double-stopping, as dear old Amy Ferguson called it, before too much ambition for the piece de resistance, that is, the adding of the bass line and therefore the real butt-kicker. Just as it took me so damn long to realize that the heart of the guitar was in the lower line as the melody, so I was sluggish to realize how to use dropped D.
This was to a very large degree the fault of the practical operation of the Roman Catholic Church and its insufferable neglect, amongst its modern bishops, to apply the norms of its own rules and advice, following Vatican Two, and the insistence, in the document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium,
that Gregorian Chant be given the pride of place.
Had the various collections of bishops North America has had in the last decades ever got their act into gear, I might have caught on sooner. Singing garbage, or the second rate, teaches us nothing, surrenders no insights.
You will, of course, need three fingers. All music resolves in three notes. Thus it imitates theology, which always resolves in three persons. Eat your heart out, all religions other than that which has been drawn up into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And yet , I must admit, it is the Virgin Mary who provided me with the insights on the D mode. Mass IX, from the good old XII century, when was born Saint Francis of Assisi, troubadour turned founder and stigmatic.
Another familiar image to keep in mind is the school teacher's blackboard, with plenty of chalk, an eraser for the inevitable mistakes that seem to come when a newly discovered doctrine is being exposed for the first time, a good old fashioned pointer for whacking on the board to wake up the nodding heads, or to point out the essential stepping stones in the crossing of the troubled and confusing stream known as music theory.
The tree, in this case, is the old fashioned D Mode, the one they used for a couple of thousand years, possibly, before someone thought of adding the Bflat, the first of the accidentals. It went like this, for a simple octave only:
D E F G A B C D
That's right, no Bflat. This means that the second half-tone comes between the B and the C, or, in the all essential numbers that no publisher other than myself seems to know how to think about, 6 and 7.
So let's have all the numbers, for just an octave, for now.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 ( This one is also known as 8.)
Furthermore, to make the schema complete, and also to smack the crap out of the tradition of the theoretical foundations of the thinking of the Teutons and their offspring - English, Dutch, Scandahoovian, etc., let's bring up solfage.
Re Me Fa So Lah Te Do Re (I give the lah an 'h' for future reference.)
Now, any really good music school will teach you all three of these names, but I'm not so sure that such music schools exist more than in theory. In my long life around music I'm the only teacher I know who has the common sense - a very favourite term of Thomas Aquinas - to start absolutely with numbers, especially in instrumental studies, and I've no history at all of leadership that has anything to do with music wheeling out the incredible dynamics of an individual or a group waltzing around with enormous effect with the syllables of solfage, when it comes to vocal instruction. It's as if Guido D'Arrezo never existed, and everyone's forgotten the story of how his fellow monks hated his guts and only the Pope of the day was able to see the light and shut their goddamn mouths, and thus put the icing on the cake that was Gregorian, at least until the polyphonists created their own versions of chaos and confusion, and lost the body of the one really important choir, the people in the pews. Nothing ever really changes, right? Christ is forever having to put the Sanhedrin in its place.
This doesn't mean that I don't like great choral music. God forbid. Everyone knows that such a creation provides an enormous sense of the choirs of heaven, of there really existing such a community as the angels, especially for those who cannot read Saint Thomas on the same subject and only get the buzz through music. But what I really love is to hear an ordinary congregation, led by a good voice or two, getting all that love, grace, salvation, and perhaps even a taste of perfection, out of the ordinary food of the mass, Gregorian Chant. Nothing else can bring the Holy Spirit so fully, so evident.
The following, by the way, works on anything, especially an organ keyboard, but what I have in mind this morning, following the nifty practices of the last couple of days, is the guitar.
1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5
5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3
1 1 5 1 5 1 1 1 1 5 1 5 1
Now, goddammit, and beating the shit out of the blackboard, get it in your imbecile head, that it is the MIDDLE line that leads the way, and that, on the guitar, is in the MIDDLE of the instrument. The 5, happily, is the fifth string, the A, open. And the 6, the 7, and the 1 continue on the same string. Only a fool, such as I was in my chords-only early days, jumps immediately to a higher string. The docile student will do well to work on just this scale, dividing it into its logical numeric parts: 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3; 3,4,5; 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3. This simple bit of common sense and humility, as opposed to the incredibly-idiotic-because-mentally-stultifying-whole-scale-method-of-interpretration, will make a Clapton or a Knopfler of the beginner more quickly than even Johann Sebastian Bach or Carlos Montoya could imagine.
In this schema, for the moment, one never even gets to the First string. Don't worry. It becomes useful, especially in the higher modes. Musicians always have to learn how to make the middle of the scales sound interesting. (Especially when they're singers.)
The upper line is, of course, the harmony. Just thirds, with the odd fourth. How simple, how neglected, like a lot of simple things. And I would recommend getting a good handle on just this basic double-stopping, as dear old Amy Ferguson called it, before too much ambition for the piece de resistance, that is, the adding of the bass line and therefore the real butt-kicker. Just as it took me so damn long to realize that the heart of the guitar was in the lower line as the melody, so I was sluggish to realize how to use dropped D.
This was to a very large degree the fault of the practical operation of the Roman Catholic Church and its insufferable neglect, amongst its modern bishops, to apply the norms of its own rules and advice, following Vatican Two, and the insistence, in the document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium,
that Gregorian Chant be given the pride of place.
Had the various collections of bishops North America has had in the last decades ever got their act into gear, I might have caught on sooner. Singing garbage, or the second rate, teaches us nothing, surrenders no insights.
You will, of course, need three fingers. All music resolves in three notes. Thus it imitates theology, which always resolves in three persons. Eat your heart out, all religions other than that which has been drawn up into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And yet , I must admit, it is the Virgin Mary who provided me with the insights on the D mode. Mass IX, from the good old XII century, when was born Saint Francis of Assisi, troubadour turned founder and stigmatic.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Ivan Turgenev
Many months ago I came home from yet another lesson in the real essentials of music - numbers, numbers, numbers - with Tim McDaniel, to find that I had received a virtual flurry of hits on my blog from Russia. In spite of the absolute necessity of spiritual perfection for getting into Heaven, the spiritual writer must always settle for relative anonymity, complete lack of notice in his own time, and never seek to expect the fame that comes to those who deliberately write for the attention of the world, sending up the traditional sops to the thinking of the earthbound, especially in the lamentable areas of gratuitious violence, sensuality, and the acquisition of wealth and power; and in religious writing, the simple minded sentimentality of those who know nothing of interior suffering, and imagine that babbling about spirituality makes for devotion; so this snow storm of attention, relatively speaking, both flabbergasted and delighted me.
Like any true lover of literature, I have, of course, enormous respect for the Russian story tellers and playwrights, and value my considerable experience, all other things considered, of their genius. For one thing, hugely important to a soul like myself whose childhood relationship with nature, with the visible earth, was unquestionably a religious relationship, the Russian love of landscape, of the fields that grew their food, had always been incredibly evocative. When I taught grade six geography, it was almost like reading the Bible to have explained to me how milleniums of birch leaves had created so many feet of top soil, and when a young friend gave me Gogol's "Dead Souls" to read I was not unaware of the humour of odd way of reckoning personal wealth among land owners, but I found the descriptions of the estates even more interesting, a most acute reminder of my own time among the fields and farms of Canada, that other great expanse of territory, so much of it virtually empty. So the fact that I could be read in Russia, thanks to the wizardry of Blogger and the Net, is such a return to some very happy and purposeful days of the past.
Tovarich.
Keep in mind also that my widowed Nana's second husband was Russian by birth, orphaned in England, and that where I live in the Kootenays makes it impossible not to be cheek by jowl with the Russian accent of the Doukhobors, who have been here in quantity since the very early 1900s. They too are great lovers of what you grow cabbages in, and all the Anglos around here have learned their recipes for borsch.
I wonder if these Russian readers have hung in there, shifting over to Google Reader. In daily life, in the quite constant encounters with new acquaintances, I invariably strike fire as an artist, a listener, a man committed to the universal presence of a basic human interest in the spiritual life, but the good ship of open exchange and conversation also quite constantly hits a reef at some point after the inescapable fact - in my life - of Catholicism crops up. That most useful phrase of Thomas Aquinas - obediential potential - seems to be a factor of individual human growth very few souls can recognize, for one reason or another, and the ignominy of relating sincerely to someone who actually believes in the need for a Pope and a carefully structured, dogmatic, Church, looms with frightening inconvenience to a variety of deeply cherished personal preferences.
Russians, of course, like everybody else, have deeply cherished personal preferences. Mostly to a man, they stick to their schismatic predicament, even if it threatens to drive them crazy, or to vodka, as the statistics show it does to an alarming extent. One can, of course, with impeccable justice, lay much of the blame on the general depression of the land of the bear created by the evil genius of Josef Stalin, and the mentally clogging filth of atheistic communism. Talk about galley slaves mired in their own excrement.
But the Russians also knew their good and useful talents of great calibre, Turgenev by no means the least. For the perceptive writer, there are magnificent weapons in his arsenal. One might consider them amongst the most effective in the unique Russian weaponry, a gifted sensitivity for dealing with a selection of the enemies of life even longer than he imagined, and perhaps more universal.
That the Czar and his minions should have put him under house arrest indicates the sickness of the anti-Western mentality in Russia he was trying to overcome, and forecasts the need of the revolution, and that Turgenev should have chronicled so well the death rattles of his society provides a wonderful index of folly in all sociological entities. His ghost rages through so many factors and elements in modern Catholicism, where leadership behaves so slavishly imitative of his tiresome government officials.
What a price we pay for illiteracy, especially in leadership.
Like any true lover of literature, I have, of course, enormous respect for the Russian story tellers and playwrights, and value my considerable experience, all other things considered, of their genius. For one thing, hugely important to a soul like myself whose childhood relationship with nature, with the visible earth, was unquestionably a religious relationship, the Russian love of landscape, of the fields that grew their food, had always been incredibly evocative. When I taught grade six geography, it was almost like reading the Bible to have explained to me how milleniums of birch leaves had created so many feet of top soil, and when a young friend gave me Gogol's "Dead Souls" to read I was not unaware of the humour of odd way of reckoning personal wealth among land owners, but I found the descriptions of the estates even more interesting, a most acute reminder of my own time among the fields and farms of Canada, that other great expanse of territory, so much of it virtually empty. So the fact that I could be read in Russia, thanks to the wizardry of Blogger and the Net, is such a return to some very happy and purposeful days of the past.
Tovarich.
Keep in mind also that my widowed Nana's second husband was Russian by birth, orphaned in England, and that where I live in the Kootenays makes it impossible not to be cheek by jowl with the Russian accent of the Doukhobors, who have been here in quantity since the very early 1900s. They too are great lovers of what you grow cabbages in, and all the Anglos around here have learned their recipes for borsch.
I wonder if these Russian readers have hung in there, shifting over to Google Reader. In daily life, in the quite constant encounters with new acquaintances, I invariably strike fire as an artist, a listener, a man committed to the universal presence of a basic human interest in the spiritual life, but the good ship of open exchange and conversation also quite constantly hits a reef at some point after the inescapable fact - in my life - of Catholicism crops up. That most useful phrase of Thomas Aquinas - obediential potential - seems to be a factor of individual human growth very few souls can recognize, for one reason or another, and the ignominy of relating sincerely to someone who actually believes in the need for a Pope and a carefully structured, dogmatic, Church, looms with frightening inconvenience to a variety of deeply cherished personal preferences.
Russians, of course, like everybody else, have deeply cherished personal preferences. Mostly to a man, they stick to their schismatic predicament, even if it threatens to drive them crazy, or to vodka, as the statistics show it does to an alarming extent. One can, of course, with impeccable justice, lay much of the blame on the general depression of the land of the bear created by the evil genius of Josef Stalin, and the mentally clogging filth of atheistic communism. Talk about galley slaves mired in their own excrement.
But the Russians also knew their good and useful talents of great calibre, Turgenev by no means the least. For the perceptive writer, there are magnificent weapons in his arsenal. One might consider them amongst the most effective in the unique Russian weaponry, a gifted sensitivity for dealing with a selection of the enemies of life even longer than he imagined, and perhaps more universal.
That the Czar and his minions should have put him under house arrest indicates the sickness of the anti-Western mentality in Russia he was trying to overcome, and forecasts the need of the revolution, and that Turgenev should have chronicled so well the death rattles of his society provides a wonderful index of folly in all sociological entities. His ghost rages through so many factors and elements in modern Catholicism, where leadership behaves so slavishly imitative of his tiresome government officials.
What a price we pay for illiteracy, especially in leadership.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
King Ralph
Yes, I'm very fond of John Goodman. A big actor, in body, and a very big actor in talent. He dances well, too, and I take a particular pleasure in watching big people show a dancer's skill. I've seen a number of his films but I'll save space and unwonted distraction by mentioning only the one, King Ralph, because it provides the perfect image for a complaint. Not about John, you understand, but about the thinking - or lack of it - behind music writing software. In case anyone hasn't seen the movie, just let me say that the salient point is that ordinary American Joe J.G., a musician anxious to cut a record and find fame and fortune, turns out to be a very distant relation to the British Royal Family and thus succeeds to the throne of England when everyone else gets electrocuted standing on metal bleachers in the damp for a group photo. Right, it's a comedy. It's a very entertaining plot, with also a beautiful actress, and when a more likely heir - Peter O'Toole - admits his connection to the crown, Goodman happily bows out in return for his own recording studio, back in L.A.
All this from me because MT has been scouting the Net for a programme by which I can share my latest scale discoveries, both in single note and added voices, with interested students. That is, interested students already familiar with ordinary staves, and who haven't been coached on my fundamental use of the numbers. The numbers people have got themselves a trio of humdingers, studies I'm almost proud of, were it not that I have to shake my head over how long it took to find something so obvious. Is that how Einstein felt when he finally came up with E=MC2?
There are a lot of programmes, but they are totally oriented to would-be composers, most of them addicted to noise. This may be all right in its place, but where is the room for teaching? Is it that difficult to the technical whiz kids to add the chops for fingering notation? One of first schemes MT found I sat to, and happily typed in an old-fashioned D mode octave, very much pleased with how much neater the computer printed than I can. But where was the device for letting me put down fingering as neatly and quickly as the notes of the scale? Do these designers have no idea of the history of wars over fingering? It's almost as outrageous as the controversies over voice training.
How can so much money, so much science, simply drop the ball where pedagogy is so necessary?
Does the Great White West really want to keep itself in the Third World as far as basic music understanding is at stake?
All this from me because MT has been scouting the Net for a programme by which I can share my latest scale discoveries, both in single note and added voices, with interested students. That is, interested students already familiar with ordinary staves, and who haven't been coached on my fundamental use of the numbers. The numbers people have got themselves a trio of humdingers, studies I'm almost proud of, were it not that I have to shake my head over how long it took to find something so obvious. Is that how Einstein felt when he finally came up with E=MC2?
There are a lot of programmes, but they are totally oriented to would-be composers, most of them addicted to noise. This may be all right in its place, but where is the room for teaching? Is it that difficult to the technical whiz kids to add the chops for fingering notation? One of first schemes MT found I sat to, and happily typed in an old-fashioned D mode octave, very much pleased with how much neater the computer printed than I can. But where was the device for letting me put down fingering as neatly and quickly as the notes of the scale? Do these designers have no idea of the history of wars over fingering? It's almost as outrageous as the controversies over voice training.
How can so much money, so much science, simply drop the ball where pedagogy is so necessary?
Does the Great White West really want to keep itself in the Third World as far as basic music understanding is at stake?
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