So, with a little research, I find out that Autumn Leaves and September Song are actually two separate ballads, written a decade apart. It was not difficult to be confused, for there was not only something of a sharing of themes and seasons, but in places a distinct similarity in the melodies. No law suit, as far as I could see on the Net, and in those days there was no Net where I could have researched the words. I was moved to recall that I actually ran them together, although I had never recalled the words of the second one until just recently.
And another correction: in other writings I have been talking about the left index finger as the digit of choice for exploring the modal scale we are beginning with, Mode One, or D minor. This choice was even filmed, on our first attack on the process last week. But further plunking about indicates that the best choice is the thumb. Not only is it the strongest digit and thus more readily effective for beginners, but also it is more readily visible on camera, being ready to hold away from the rest of the hand. And when it is the left thumb that is employed, to read the melody note of an arrangement an octave below its printed setting, the student naturally gets the male range, which is much more inspiring than trying to execute a tune that sounds an octave above the normal comfort zone.
This is especially true when studying chant, which was originally sung by adult monks, not school girls.
We filmed again today, finding that the mike boom can be raised nicely to create a wider view of the Roller keyboard, all the way from Great C to f above middle c. I had been dealing with Chant as if its highest note were an e', but with the thought lurking that I had somewhere seen an f'. I found the higher note today, quite by accident, in Gloria 1. Being able to see right down to the lowest note Bach had to work with on the keyboards of his youth provides full information on harmony.
And the f' as the highest note brings a bonus to the singers. The solfa for f is FAH, thus a most relaxed vowel and thus a comfortable note to old for the end of the singer's phrase, whereas my original gaining the summit at Me (Mi), thus EE, leaves the conclusion holding on to one of the most tense of high vowels, and thus much more difficult to sing with ease, at least in my experience. The company and expectation of the Ah sound great helps the EE to relax. (Irish singers take note, please.) This rediscovery, just before lunch, was an encouraging comfort. I learned it years ago, when researching with my son, but in this diocese had never had the chance to put such wisdom to use with Gregorian Chant.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Autumn Leaves
I learned the words and tune for that dear old melancholy classic, September Song, back in 1957, from my tent mate, Alex Doulis, a native of Victoria, student of the UBC school of engineering, and all round lover of music. We sang it along the left bank of Mosley Creek, a major tributary of the Homathko, the river our employer, the BC Power Commission, intended to dam for the purpose of lighting up thousands of homes and businesses on Vancouver Island. Along with a couple of other ballads concerned with loves that had come and gone, it became a standard for singing in my car when I got back to Vancouver and the university. I never learned the chord structure for party performances. It's also been a tune I've plunked out on the piano for learning purposes, trying to decipher, with only partial success, the musical arithmetic for the minor keys. The Muse has coached me through many problems, but only very recently have I come to grasp some of the secrets for moderating the extremes of all-minor harmonies, and recently set forth in narrative form in another blog, Mr. Cameron's Conservatory. I haven't tackled September Song for some time, so it will be interesting to take my new-found knowledge to it.
Just singing it acapella was a great vocal exercise, of course. It's the perfect student song: slow, beautful words even in translation, and a painting as well as a song. It's also extremely easy to spoil, as are all things as simple as they are lovely. Even without banjo or guitar chords, it made a significant contribution to my self-designed vocal studies programme.
"Those autumn leaves drift by my window,
"Those autumn leaves of red and gold . . . ."
I haven't thought of it for some time, what with all the other stuff going on, but it came around again this afternoon after Marianne put me through another rehearsal for "The Scientific Piano" and, in the triumph of that, I turned to some old journal notes. My instinct for date was bang on: for on this day in 1983, the old feast of Our Lady of Ransom, I made references to the attempt to make a record that my oldest son and I were setting out upon. It came a cropper, as I have mentioned earlier. God simply robbed my voice of its upper octave. The recording engineer, Del Detmar, a one time rocker performing in Wembley Stadium, London, was delighted with the lower range, but he never got to hear the other half. God simply cut the mystic off at the usual throat passages that lead to loftier moments.
Thus throughout this recent journey to the World Wife Web, I've naturally had to live the apprehension that the divine garotte would make a return visit. No idle apprehension, the vocal interference has been a constant, relentless, unyielding companion of this research process, all for the sake of getting the numbers and fundamental fingering into their rightful perspective. This must be happening, finally, because the high notes have more or less returned. I get the feeling that the less can be made up for by adequate practice, which was not unknown to me way back when. As with other athletic activity, the secret is in sufficient warm up. And of course, divine permission going hand in hand with the right technology, in this case the Windows 7 live movie, and a microphone and earphones which let me hear my own voice accurately. I feel like a classroom teacher again, this time with wiring.
I thought of the old ballad because of the September Song not only of 1983, but also previous autumns when my son Francis seriously considered enrolling in our local college music school, but then decided against it, resolving simply to carry on with his rock bands and the singing trechnique he had learned so diligently with his father. In those weeks of the falling leaves, which is also the time when the northern hemisphere goes back to school, I would always experience a deep sadness, or melancholy. I really did not know what it meant. I attempted an exegesis, of course, but getting no farther than to wonder if I were just sad because my boy was not enrolling in post secondary education, which had done so much for both me and his mother. But in 1983, after he was married, he did enroll locally as well as attempting the task of producing my record of folk songs. Yet, with the crash of the studio attempt, the melancholy really turned up again, and obviously it had nothing to do with him.
Only recently have I recognized the significance of the mood. It was the sadness of Christ, his sorrow over the evil times that fell upon music instruction and Gregorian Chant after the Renaissance, up to and including the deplorable state of so much parish music, and the unmistakable sign, recurring again and again in many forms and circumstances, that has led and dragged me through the epic of research that began in 1990 with my oldest granddaughter.
Just singing it acapella was a great vocal exercise, of course. It's the perfect student song: slow, beautful words even in translation, and a painting as well as a song. It's also extremely easy to spoil, as are all things as simple as they are lovely. Even without banjo or guitar chords, it made a significant contribution to my self-designed vocal studies programme.
"Those autumn leaves drift by my window,
"Those autumn leaves of red and gold . . . ."
I haven't thought of it for some time, what with all the other stuff going on, but it came around again this afternoon after Marianne put me through another rehearsal for "The Scientific Piano" and, in the triumph of that, I turned to some old journal notes. My instinct for date was bang on: for on this day in 1983, the old feast of Our Lady of Ransom, I made references to the attempt to make a record that my oldest son and I were setting out upon. It came a cropper, as I have mentioned earlier. God simply robbed my voice of its upper octave. The recording engineer, Del Detmar, a one time rocker performing in Wembley Stadium, London, was delighted with the lower range, but he never got to hear the other half. God simply cut the mystic off at the usual throat passages that lead to loftier moments.
Thus throughout this recent journey to the World Wife Web, I've naturally had to live the apprehension that the divine garotte would make a return visit. No idle apprehension, the vocal interference has been a constant, relentless, unyielding companion of this research process, all for the sake of getting the numbers and fundamental fingering into their rightful perspective. This must be happening, finally, because the high notes have more or less returned. I get the feeling that the less can be made up for by adequate practice, which was not unknown to me way back when. As with other athletic activity, the secret is in sufficient warm up. And of course, divine permission going hand in hand with the right technology, in this case the Windows 7 live movie, and a microphone and earphones which let me hear my own voice accurately. I feel like a classroom teacher again, this time with wiring.
I thought of the old ballad because of the September Song not only of 1983, but also previous autumns when my son Francis seriously considered enrolling in our local college music school, but then decided against it, resolving simply to carry on with his rock bands and the singing trechnique he had learned so diligently with his father. In those weeks of the falling leaves, which is also the time when the northern hemisphere goes back to school, I would always experience a deep sadness, or melancholy. I really did not know what it meant. I attempted an exegesis, of course, but getting no farther than to wonder if I were just sad because my boy was not enrolling in post secondary education, which had done so much for both me and his mother. But in 1983, after he was married, he did enroll locally as well as attempting the task of producing my record of folk songs. Yet, with the crash of the studio attempt, the melancholy really turned up again, and obviously it had nothing to do with him.
Only recently have I recognized the significance of the mood. It was the sadness of Christ, his sorrow over the evil times that fell upon music instruction and Gregorian Chant after the Renaissance, up to and including the deplorable state of so much parish music, and the unmistakable sign, recurring again and again in many forms and circumstances, that has led and dragged me through the epic of research that began in 1990 with my oldest granddaughter.
Friday, September 6, 2013
First Rehearsal
My mind goes back to my very first post on the Ranger, when I wrote of Father Vincent McNabb, the English Dominican of the last century who was wary of technology. I know nothing about his tastes in music, but it's difficult to imagine a good priest, as he most certainly was, being an enemy of Gregorian Chant. And therefore he would approve of a technology that could educate the universe on the merits of the finest music the Church will ever know for the purposes of worship through the liturgy.
I've read his biography only once, and that at least two decades ago, so I also don't know what he thought of theatre, but I know what I think of theatre, and that is also a subject on my mind as I ponder what we are about to present over the Web. The exercise of the morning was to make sure the Shure was relating to the computer. Finally, it was. ( I sit helpless until MT has mastered the gadgetry, but once I hear my voice muttering through I'm okay, and my brain resumes normal functioning.) Then it was time to consider the initial webcam. It was a cheapo, and it's been around for a while. Odd colouring on the computer monitor, and a very slow time delay. My fingers were good to see in action on the Roller keyboard, but they most certainly moved in slow motion.
The slow motion was not all that bad, because when presenting music understanding and technique to beginners of any age level, slow and repetitive is Job One, especially when you can use the voice to sing and explain. But I had an instinct that computer science had improved, and I was right, as we discovered in our trip to the computer store.
I'd been in the store, some years ago, with the previous owner, when I had to tell him that the software he was offering me for the sake of piano instruction had been put together by someone who didn't know what I was learning. When we went in today I enjoyed informing the new owner that we were hoping for an improved webcam, because now that I'd finally learned all that I needed to understand to make a sound beginning, we hoped that the technology he had for sale could facilitate distribution. He did have, bless him, just the thing, and now a very nice little Logitech webcam hangs on the mike boom, right beside the mike, so when its action on the set we can swing it right over the piano keyboard, and I'm right in there with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, only we'll call it "Numbers and Music", instead of "Words and Music". Well, there will be words, and lots of them, but the purpose is to restore music to its proper relationship to mathematics. So there will also be lots of numbers.(Too bad Sesame Street didn't know how to put the Count to this kind of labour.)
Numbers here, numbers there, bloody numbers everywhere. They're even annoying at first, if you haven't been raised with them. The only thing more intellectual than numbers is sheer metaphysics itself, but knowing how to use the numbers in music is almost as comforting in the long run, to a musician, because of the mental security, than metaphysics is to a real philosopher.
"Today's show is brought to you by the numbers one to five, going backwards." Once that priority is established, perhaps we can sponsor a lesson by the letter "D", inasmuch as D is number one not only in the D scale, major or minor, but also numero uno in the D mode, which also happens - oh, oh - numbers again, to be Mode One.
"Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to be . . . ."
Lovely song, of course, and very well done on stage and screen, but reiterated universally in classrooms, somewhat inefficient, because it too masked the essential role of numbers. So here's the opening lyrics for a film called "The Sounds of Common Sense".
"So you think you are a singer,
And a star you'd like to be,
Then sit right down, and go to town,
Understanding the Mode in D."
Do I hear all the conservatories, music faculties, and publishers absolutely outraged because I have ignored dear old C major for the opening day of theory class? I can't really blame them, of course, because until I knew better it was always the way I started a beginner myself. And if I had never learned the natural superiority of numbers over letters I would still be starting that way. And of course C major also plays a key part in explaining modal theory. One simply cannot do without it, even though it also must be admitted that certain promoters of the modes have done awfully strange things with it, from failing to grasp the ancient rule of numerical foundations.
So to completely avoid such blunders, and to establish the genius of the numbers right off the bat, we open with Mode One, that is, the scale modern music calls D minor. There are possibly a dozen reasons for this beginning, to be explained as occasion arises.
For those who like fiction, some of those explanations have already been set out in a different blog, Mr. Cameron's Conservatory.
I've read his biography only once, and that at least two decades ago, so I also don't know what he thought of theatre, but I know what I think of theatre, and that is also a subject on my mind as I ponder what we are about to present over the Web. The exercise of the morning was to make sure the Shure was relating to the computer. Finally, it was. ( I sit helpless until MT has mastered the gadgetry, but once I hear my voice muttering through I'm okay, and my brain resumes normal functioning.) Then it was time to consider the initial webcam. It was a cheapo, and it's been around for a while. Odd colouring on the computer monitor, and a very slow time delay. My fingers were good to see in action on the Roller keyboard, but they most certainly moved in slow motion.
The slow motion was not all that bad, because when presenting music understanding and technique to beginners of any age level, slow and repetitive is Job One, especially when you can use the voice to sing and explain. But I had an instinct that computer science had improved, and I was right, as we discovered in our trip to the computer store.
I'd been in the store, some years ago, with the previous owner, when I had to tell him that the software he was offering me for the sake of piano instruction had been put together by someone who didn't know what I was learning. When we went in today I enjoyed informing the new owner that we were hoping for an improved webcam, because now that I'd finally learned all that I needed to understand to make a sound beginning, we hoped that the technology he had for sale could facilitate distribution. He did have, bless him, just the thing, and now a very nice little Logitech webcam hangs on the mike boom, right beside the mike, so when its action on the set we can swing it right over the piano keyboard, and I'm right in there with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, only we'll call it "Numbers and Music", instead of "Words and Music". Well, there will be words, and lots of them, but the purpose is to restore music to its proper relationship to mathematics. So there will also be lots of numbers.(Too bad Sesame Street didn't know how to put the Count to this kind of labour.)
Numbers here, numbers there, bloody numbers everywhere. They're even annoying at first, if you haven't been raised with them. The only thing more intellectual than numbers is sheer metaphysics itself, but knowing how to use the numbers in music is almost as comforting in the long run, to a musician, because of the mental security, than metaphysics is to a real philosopher.
"Today's show is brought to you by the numbers one to five, going backwards." Once that priority is established, perhaps we can sponsor a lesson by the letter "D", inasmuch as D is number one not only in the D scale, major or minor, but also numero uno in the D mode, which also happens - oh, oh - numbers again, to be Mode One.
"Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to be . . . ."
Lovely song, of course, and very well done on stage and screen, but reiterated universally in classrooms, somewhat inefficient, because it too masked the essential role of numbers. So here's the opening lyrics for a film called "The Sounds of Common Sense".
"So you think you are a singer,
And a star you'd like to be,
Then sit right down, and go to town,
Understanding the Mode in D."
Do I hear all the conservatories, music faculties, and publishers absolutely outraged because I have ignored dear old C major for the opening day of theory class? I can't really blame them, of course, because until I knew better it was always the way I started a beginner myself. And if I had never learned the natural superiority of numbers over letters I would still be starting that way. And of course C major also plays a key part in explaining modal theory. One simply cannot do without it, even though it also must be admitted that certain promoters of the modes have done awfully strange things with it, from failing to grasp the ancient rule of numerical foundations.
So to completely avoid such blunders, and to establish the genius of the numbers right off the bat, we open with Mode One, that is, the scale modern music calls D minor. There are possibly a dozen reasons for this beginning, to be explained as occasion arises.
For those who like fiction, some of those explanations have already been set out in a different blog, Mr. Cameron's Conservatory.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Side Yard Productions
Well, I'm still no self-starter on the computer. Anything I learn about the little beast, and eventually get how to romp away with on it, I learn from Marianne. She's as fiercely capable with the technology of the Net as she is with the kitchen, the garden and yard, alternative medicine and so forth, and this is good because the lad who was to make a tiny film about the piano fingering for a journalist is still busy about something else, so MT has been investigating the possibilities on the Dell and the Philips and tells me that both Picassa and Google Plus provide small film-making facilities that can off-ramp to You Tube. As she has, from long ago, enormous credits in stage experience, not only as an actor and musician, she will bring no little skill to the production side of things.
She's already begun by changing the desktop. We had, for months, Chris Rowat's lovely photo of Tatlayoko Lake, then for a bit a study of the famous Orange Bridge that connects Nelson with the North Shore and the road to Kaslo, and now we have a stunning shot, hers, of the yard on the west side of our house, looking north past the bergamot and lavender and other flowers over the hedge to the lake shore. The photo is taken from one of the chairs sitting in this location for summer socializing.
I'm reminded of the day in 1982, also in August, when she asked how one applied for a job as a literary agent. Three months later she was sending, with a small covering letter of her own concocting, the first three chapters of my novel to John Paul II. The rest is history, culminating with his canonization, now scheduled for the end of April.
Communications technology has been much revolutionized since the early 80s, and now writers, teachers, performers can send anything to anyone anywhere in the world where there is a computer. It's so democratic that the receiver doesn't even have to own one. He only needs a public library, a cafe, a friend that can lend him a keyboard, and he's got his hands on whatever is aimed at him.
So now MT presides over this experiment in music instruction. The sketch of a harmony scale that was initially thought of for a journalist's private viewing is now in preparation for the world wide application of You Tube.
#
Less than 24 hours later, Madame producer and I sauntered into our local music store and laid hands on a Shure microphone that will plug into a USB port. I sound so knowledgeable only because I was eves dropping on the conversation between MT and Rylan Kuen, the store's enormously knowledgeable - and funny - counterman.
Hello World! Are you ready to rock?
Hello Mystical Body. Are you ready to be taken back to the liturgy Saint Francis of Assisi brought from France to the Roman Church?
#
And now the room is rearranged. Gone the old eight-foot folding table that everything sat on, replaced with a real computer desk, just given us by neighbour Lynn, who is moving to smaller quarters in Vancouver. Then there is a separate set of shelves for other parts of the equipment, and the two pieces are set up at right angles so all the connecting wires and related devices are visible. I'll have to learn more about doing things for myself. Thus back to my cadet days, when I was taught how to run the radios they used in tanks.
She's already begun by changing the desktop. We had, for months, Chris Rowat's lovely photo of Tatlayoko Lake, then for a bit a study of the famous Orange Bridge that connects Nelson with the North Shore and the road to Kaslo, and now we have a stunning shot, hers, of the yard on the west side of our house, looking north past the bergamot and lavender and other flowers over the hedge to the lake shore. The photo is taken from one of the chairs sitting in this location for summer socializing.
I'm reminded of the day in 1982, also in August, when she asked how one applied for a job as a literary agent. Three months later she was sending, with a small covering letter of her own concocting, the first three chapters of my novel to John Paul II. The rest is history, culminating with his canonization, now scheduled for the end of April.
Communications technology has been much revolutionized since the early 80s, and now writers, teachers, performers can send anything to anyone anywhere in the world where there is a computer. It's so democratic that the receiver doesn't even have to own one. He only needs a public library, a cafe, a friend that can lend him a keyboard, and he's got his hands on whatever is aimed at him.
So now MT presides over this experiment in music instruction. The sketch of a harmony scale that was initially thought of for a journalist's private viewing is now in preparation for the world wide application of You Tube.
#
Less than 24 hours later, Madame producer and I sauntered into our local music store and laid hands on a Shure microphone that will plug into a USB port. I sound so knowledgeable only because I was eves dropping on the conversation between MT and Rylan Kuen, the store's enormously knowledgeable - and funny - counterman.
Hello World! Are you ready to rock?
Hello Mystical Body. Are you ready to be taken back to the liturgy Saint Francis of Assisi brought from France to the Roman Church?
#
And now the room is rearranged. Gone the old eight-foot folding table that everything sat on, replaced with a real computer desk, just given us by neighbour Lynn, who is moving to smaller quarters in Vancouver. Then there is a separate set of shelves for other parts of the equipment, and the two pieces are set up at right angles so all the connecting wires and related devices are visible. I'll have to learn more about doing things for myself. Thus back to my cadet days, when I was taught how to run the radios they used in tanks.
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
A Short Film Career
My film career went as soon as it came. Antonio and I will continue to talk about his magnum opus, but my little part, small as it was to be, is still too big for a music methods researcher not quite into the full swing of being able to demonstrate his findings. The final patterns are substantially in place, but my fingers are too far from being able to rattle them off as I know I must for the skeptics. Our culture is by no means rich with philosophers. As Maritain said long ago, few have the mental talons to be able to seize an idea. And besides: this is Nelson, and there are a number of actors around here who can play the part as well as I can, and none of them in danger of being distracted by my pressures of the moment.
I'm glad I know something about Christopher Columbus. Over and over again, as I've come up with yet again a brilliant bit of structural understanding I cannot find in theory books, because they have forgotten that music is a child of mathematics, I remember that he really was a nut case, according to all the known facts of ocean navigation and the real distance between known continents. History in the hands of some has inclined to abuse the Dominican experts at the court of Spain, preferring to forget that they really did know what they were talking about: India was simply too far for the navigational abilities of 1492. But the sea dog from Genoa had an intuition, something that always, eventually, defeats an only apparent science.
Unlike Columbus, I have not kept two logs, one of which is a false journal, conceived to deceive his restless crews and save him from mutiny. But I have constantly failed to see all the complications of my process of discovery, simply because, like South America, what was there was hitherto unknown. Thus, I could agree to take a part in the film and devote a fair amount of time to dealing with the role and the process.
The role was tempting because it would have given me a chance, as designed by Antonio once he saw the inside of the cathedral, to swank out a little on Gregorian chant, that poor aborted foetus of the vast majority of modern bishops, traitors to the plain stipulations of Vatican Two and facilitators for possibly the ugliest worship music the Church as ever known. Just a little chant, mind you. This was a cameo of cameo appearances, possibly a portent of greater things to come, but for the moment only a taste.
But I was becoming a man divided, wanting to be helpful with film and seeing a small window on behalf of real liturgy, yet at the same time racking up other film and media contacts who just might facilitate the more foundational opportunities of what I must insist is the most intelligent and genuinely musical set of studies ever offered to student of the piano and organ. And still, of course, not myself caught up in the deftness that would make the pros take notice.
And speaking of pros, Shawn and I yesterday ran into Antonio downtown, I think just going home from the gym at the Civic complex. The film goes forward. He takes it all in his stride.
And this weekend the Alberta Three do my Bluebell song at the Fort Edmonton Storytelling Festival's Twenty-fifth Anniversary. The universe continues to unfold.
I'm glad I know something about Christopher Columbus. Over and over again, as I've come up with yet again a brilliant bit of structural understanding I cannot find in theory books, because they have forgotten that music is a child of mathematics, I remember that he really was a nut case, according to all the known facts of ocean navigation and the real distance between known continents. History in the hands of some has inclined to abuse the Dominican experts at the court of Spain, preferring to forget that they really did know what they were talking about: India was simply too far for the navigational abilities of 1492. But the sea dog from Genoa had an intuition, something that always, eventually, defeats an only apparent science.
Unlike Columbus, I have not kept two logs, one of which is a false journal, conceived to deceive his restless crews and save him from mutiny. But I have constantly failed to see all the complications of my process of discovery, simply because, like South America, what was there was hitherto unknown. Thus, I could agree to take a part in the film and devote a fair amount of time to dealing with the role and the process.
The role was tempting because it would have given me a chance, as designed by Antonio once he saw the inside of the cathedral, to swank out a little on Gregorian chant, that poor aborted foetus of the vast majority of modern bishops, traitors to the plain stipulations of Vatican Two and facilitators for possibly the ugliest worship music the Church as ever known. Just a little chant, mind you. This was a cameo of cameo appearances, possibly a portent of greater things to come, but for the moment only a taste.
But I was becoming a man divided, wanting to be helpful with film and seeing a small window on behalf of real liturgy, yet at the same time racking up other film and media contacts who just might facilitate the more foundational opportunities of what I must insist is the most intelligent and genuinely musical set of studies ever offered to student of the piano and organ. And still, of course, not myself caught up in the deftness that would make the pros take notice.
And speaking of pros, Shawn and I yesterday ran into Antonio downtown, I think just going home from the gym at the Civic complex. The film goes forward. He takes it all in his stride.
And this weekend the Alberta Three do my Bluebell song at the Fort Edmonton Storytelling Festival's Twenty-fifth Anniversary. The universe continues to unfold.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
The Lost Actor
A few months ago I wrote a letter to the Nelson Star using the very technical theological term "locution", and the Star, although it is by no means the mouthpiece of the local Catholic Church, printed the letter. I was both grateful and relieved. Grateful, because no writer likes to see his efforts wasted; and relieved because the previous letter I had written to our local newspaper had not been sent to print, the editor having decided it contained too much criticism of persons and an era he was not familiar with. I was disappointed over the rejected letter, but as someone who believes in the relative sacredness of conscience there was no way I could argue with the editor's decision. The rejected letter had to do with the late Bishop W.E. Doyle, a scoundrel if there ever was one, and all his harm had been committed long before Bob Hall, the editor, came from Edmonton to work for the old Nelson Daily News.
The locution, that is, words from the mouth of Almighty God delivered to the mind of one of his creatures, a young man utterly puzzled by much of his life at that time, was exactly this: "The university is going, but the movies are coming." It came to me in the spring of 1965, as I was walking down the 600 block, Mill Street, thus heading in the direction of the Cathedral of Mary Immaculate, at that time the centre of the diocese. I had been in Nelson something like eight months, was still spinning through each day in utter amazement at all the turns my life had taken since I had arrived here, but fundamentally secure, thanks to my daily reading of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and confident that "God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world." I had by then left the little Catholic university I had enrolled in, the previous autumn, had started once again with the dear old "Yacht Novel", and as well as that put in three weeks at the building site of the Duncan Dam, getting my tail frozen as a rod man on the survey crew.
And a few weeks ago, as I sat in my chair in Oso Negro, an over-the-top coffee outlet a block south of Nelson's world famous Baker Street (how many films, paintings, etc, now?), all by myself with a little ring binder in which I have been trying out the first words for a poem which just might be longer than The Iliad, I noticed across the aisle a young man I had never noticed before. (To me, a man of fifty is young.) And he was alone.
He was not unimpressive. A body builder's physique, and a face born to play both tragic and heroic roles. Long hair. And, as I was to learn, a writer who brooded in the spirit of Victor Hugo and Sir Walter Scott. I knew absolutely none of this last, of course, but I was about to find out.
I decided there could be no harm in speaking to him. "Are you having a good day, so far?" I said.
He said that he was, and more than that, he became completely attentive. We exchanged a few more pleasantries of the kind that often come up come up between hitherto perfect strangers in Nelson. but also quickly got to the point where we knew we both might have very much in common, so much in common that we had to admit that such a "chance encounter" was in fact no chance at all but utterly providential, in fact, predestined. He brought his cup of coffee and himself across the aisle to my table, and we got to it.
I discovered quite quickly that he was a fellow novelist, and more than that, was at the moment making a feature film based on his book. The book had won an award in Quebec, which could have resulted in a publishing deal, but he had decided to look for a larger market than would come to him through that route, was wondering about a bit of rewrite, and meanwhile making the film.
I had in fact heard a little about the movie a few months previous, from someone who was actually in it, but at that time my mind was either in the Chilcotin Cariboo, Rome, or the music researches. With the conclusion of the questions still to come, but knowing they were near, I could not be distracted. But by that morning the Cariboo had quietened down, Rome had acquired a new Pope, and I was so happily at the end of my investigations into theory and fingering that I was relating to a prospective publisher and a prospective graphic designer. Life was nicely levelling out, and thus I was free for a new challenge.
Or rather, to be absolutely precise, a wrapping up, thanks to divine providence, of a lot of old challenges. He turned out to be a vigorous laddie, my new acquaintance. And one destined to be in the thick of things. Consider this. Last evening an email from him, telling me that the chase scene in Saints and Outlaws, not in automobiles, but on horses thundering across the fields of Napoleonic France, (aka the fields of the Slocan Valley) was all done, in spite of the current heat wave. A few hours later, as I fired up the computer to talk to a Vancouver Sun reporter about the music matter, I see a Telus news note about 3,000 souls handed evacuation notices because of a truck loaded with helicopter fuel finding itself in a Slocan Valley creek, inadvertantly offloading 35,000 gallons of its volatile and poisonous cargo. I must admit I was praying for Antonio Bastone and his cast and crew to get gracefully through their day. And so, wherever he was, was our Capuchin bishop, who only last week had nodded his permission for me to be filmed in his cathedral. Antonio has decided I should play the good cardinal who has come to straighten out some bad churchmen.
And as if that weren't enough action, later on this morning I meet with a Nelson lad, not born here but adopted and raised here, who has recently opened a recording studio. He was, with my oldest son, something of a daredevil when he was young, and as an adult turned that imagination into running light shows for major entertainment groups. Rock stars and all that. He's just home from jazzing up the visuals for Michael Buble, in England, he called to answer my phone message of previous days, and over the next month he and I just might come up with some of the most interesting and useful scale harmonies ever recorded on film.
As Chuck Berry said, and everybody sang, "Roll Over, Beethoven."
The locution, that is, words from the mouth of Almighty God delivered to the mind of one of his creatures, a young man utterly puzzled by much of his life at that time, was exactly this: "The university is going, but the movies are coming." It came to me in the spring of 1965, as I was walking down the 600 block, Mill Street, thus heading in the direction of the Cathedral of Mary Immaculate, at that time the centre of the diocese. I had been in Nelson something like eight months, was still spinning through each day in utter amazement at all the turns my life had taken since I had arrived here, but fundamentally secure, thanks to my daily reading of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and confident that "God was in His heaven, and all was right with the world." I had by then left the little Catholic university I had enrolled in, the previous autumn, had started once again with the dear old "Yacht Novel", and as well as that put in three weeks at the building site of the Duncan Dam, getting my tail frozen as a rod man on the survey crew.
And a few weeks ago, as I sat in my chair in Oso Negro, an over-the-top coffee outlet a block south of Nelson's world famous Baker Street (how many films, paintings, etc, now?), all by myself with a little ring binder in which I have been trying out the first words for a poem which just might be longer than The Iliad, I noticed across the aisle a young man I had never noticed before. (To me, a man of fifty is young.) And he was alone.
He was not unimpressive. A body builder's physique, and a face born to play both tragic and heroic roles. Long hair. And, as I was to learn, a writer who brooded in the spirit of Victor Hugo and Sir Walter Scott. I knew absolutely none of this last, of course, but I was about to find out.
I decided there could be no harm in speaking to him. "Are you having a good day, so far?" I said.
He said that he was, and more than that, he became completely attentive. We exchanged a few more pleasantries of the kind that often come up come up between hitherto perfect strangers in Nelson. but also quickly got to the point where we knew we both might have very much in common, so much in common that we had to admit that such a "chance encounter" was in fact no chance at all but utterly providential, in fact, predestined. He brought his cup of coffee and himself across the aisle to my table, and we got to it.
I discovered quite quickly that he was a fellow novelist, and more than that, was at the moment making a feature film based on his book. The book had won an award in Quebec, which could have resulted in a publishing deal, but he had decided to look for a larger market than would come to him through that route, was wondering about a bit of rewrite, and meanwhile making the film.
I had in fact heard a little about the movie a few months previous, from someone who was actually in it, but at that time my mind was either in the Chilcotin Cariboo, Rome, or the music researches. With the conclusion of the questions still to come, but knowing they were near, I could not be distracted. But by that morning the Cariboo had quietened down, Rome had acquired a new Pope, and I was so happily at the end of my investigations into theory and fingering that I was relating to a prospective publisher and a prospective graphic designer. Life was nicely levelling out, and thus I was free for a new challenge.
Or rather, to be absolutely precise, a wrapping up, thanks to divine providence, of a lot of old challenges. He turned out to be a vigorous laddie, my new acquaintance. And one destined to be in the thick of things. Consider this. Last evening an email from him, telling me that the chase scene in Saints and Outlaws, not in automobiles, but on horses thundering across the fields of Napoleonic France, (aka the fields of the Slocan Valley) was all done, in spite of the current heat wave. A few hours later, as I fired up the computer to talk to a Vancouver Sun reporter about the music matter, I see a Telus news note about 3,000 souls handed evacuation notices because of a truck loaded with helicopter fuel finding itself in a Slocan Valley creek, inadvertantly offloading 35,000 gallons of its volatile and poisonous cargo. I must admit I was praying for Antonio Bastone and his cast and crew to get gracefully through their day. And so, wherever he was, was our Capuchin bishop, who only last week had nodded his permission for me to be filmed in his cathedral. Antonio has decided I should play the good cardinal who has come to straighten out some bad churchmen.
And as if that weren't enough action, later on this morning I meet with a Nelson lad, not born here but adopted and raised here, who has recently opened a recording studio. He was, with my oldest son, something of a daredevil when he was young, and as an adult turned that imagination into running light shows for major entertainment groups. Rock stars and all that. He's just home from jazzing up the visuals for Michael Buble, in England, he called to answer my phone message of previous days, and over the next month he and I just might come up with some of the most interesting and useful scale harmonies ever recorded on film.
As Chuck Berry said, and everybody sang, "Roll Over, Beethoven."
Saturday, July 13, 2013
The Lost Chords
About a couple of months ago I wandered upstairs and took from the philosophy section of the study shelves a very old favourite, Jacques Maritain's Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, but I only read an initial page or two, then left it in the shelves beside my living room chair until I was truly ready to give it fuller attention, something that could not happen until I was closer, very much closer, to my goal with the music research. Maritain's writing is always a comfortable challenge to the mind, but so was the music research, relying as it did utterly on the intelligent application of the wisdom found in the books of wisdom: "I have ordered all things by measure, number, and weight." And in fact at that point I had actually not yet found the absolute heart of the complete application of measure and numbers as it applies to the keyboard and the fingers that play it. Providential timing wished, I think, for Tim McDaniel to have a real summer holiday. This latest, and I hope, last, major discovery will require the most concentration of any of the study units we so far have come up with, so it is best left for the fall and the energy that returns to a task after a good holiday. Besides, that gives me more time to apply my own concentration to seven distinct three-note patterns, each so close together as to leave plenty of room for mutual confusion.
I have, of course, designed a lot of patterns over the years and decades, especially for the left hand, which is the first and best place to learn this one. That is, it is studied three notes at a time in the left hand, but actually applied by using only two notes in the left while the third note is that of the melody, played by the right hand.
I am quite honestly astounded that such a musical, intriguing, and practical method for learning the essence of harmony and deadly accurate fingering should never have turned up before, in some curious mind other than my own. I can only explain the lack of such common sense to myself by thinking that learning by rote is much more popular with more teachers and students than it has ever been with me. Or perhaps that most people who are happy learning music via letters and/or solfage believe themselves too artistic and creative to bother with grubby old arithmetic, reminding them of long, boring, hours with long division, book keeping, or counting returning salmon. There is something so utterly plebian about plain old numbers.
And yet, once you see and hear them at work within the challenge of learning an instrument, especially an instrument built to provide harmonies, you realize the sheer and utter magic of plain old one, two, three as they unlock the mystery and the great overburden of befuddlement that greets the untutored and probably much frightened beginner.
The fallen minds of men have quite possibly never created a more impenetrable mental jungle than music theory and advice as they can appear to the average beginner. (Now that I can wander blissfully around the summit of the mountain and the forest I have been climbing up and through for so many years I can't really call the directions all those texts attempt to give "instruction". The best title I think they can claim for themselves is advice, and we all have had experience of how much easier it is to give advice rather than really teach.)
But a little concrete improvement, outside these blogs, may be on the way. Now that the world knows that John Paul II, my old spiritual client, is to be canonized in December, Nelson and district seems to be returning to its pre-1982 modus operandi, and Providence has been very busy helping me find useful associates, here and elsewhere. Some very satisfying meetings, formal and informal, and the inspiration for a number of provocative emails.
I have, of course, designed a lot of patterns over the years and decades, especially for the left hand, which is the first and best place to learn this one. That is, it is studied three notes at a time in the left hand, but actually applied by using only two notes in the left while the third note is that of the melody, played by the right hand.
I am quite honestly astounded that such a musical, intriguing, and practical method for learning the essence of harmony and deadly accurate fingering should never have turned up before, in some curious mind other than my own. I can only explain the lack of such common sense to myself by thinking that learning by rote is much more popular with more teachers and students than it has ever been with me. Or perhaps that most people who are happy learning music via letters and/or solfage believe themselves too artistic and creative to bother with grubby old arithmetic, reminding them of long, boring, hours with long division, book keeping, or counting returning salmon. There is something so utterly plebian about plain old numbers.
And yet, once you see and hear them at work within the challenge of learning an instrument, especially an instrument built to provide harmonies, you realize the sheer and utter magic of plain old one, two, three as they unlock the mystery and the great overburden of befuddlement that greets the untutored and probably much frightened beginner.
The fallen minds of men have quite possibly never created a more impenetrable mental jungle than music theory and advice as they can appear to the average beginner. (Now that I can wander blissfully around the summit of the mountain and the forest I have been climbing up and through for so many years I can't really call the directions all those texts attempt to give "instruction". The best title I think they can claim for themselves is advice, and we all have had experience of how much easier it is to give advice rather than really teach.)
But a little concrete improvement, outside these blogs, may be on the way. Now that the world knows that John Paul II, my old spiritual client, is to be canonized in December, Nelson and district seems to be returning to its pre-1982 modus operandi, and Providence has been very busy helping me find useful associates, here and elsewhere. Some very satisfying meetings, formal and informal, and the inspiration for a number of provocative emails.
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