Category Archives: Arts & culture

“The sound of all of us…”

Last summer I learned a song that has stuck with me ever since. I was at a religious education summer conference, and Laurie Loosigian taught us “This Is the Sound of One Voice,” written by Ruth Moody of the Wailing Jennies. The melody reminds me of white spirituals, and it easy to harmonize. The lyrics sound equally good around a campfire or in a liberal church. The first verse says:

This is the sound of one voice,
One spirit, one voice,
The sound of one who makes a choice;
This is the sound of one voice.

The second and third verses are about two voices and then three voices singing together, and then the song says:

This is the sound of all of us:
Singing with love and the will to trust,
Leave the rest behind it will turn to dust;
This is the sound of all of us.

There’s an online video of the Wailing Jennies singing the song here. They sing in close harmony, with the usual slightly breathy voices of the commercial folk music circuit. I’d rather sing it full-throated, with more dispersed harmonies, and more emotion — less like commercial folk, and more like a spiritual. Either way, I think it would make a pretty good song to sing in church.

Mr. Crankypants is in awe

Mr. Crankypants is seriously impressed by the brazenness of the health care industry. Dan, Mr. C.’s stupid alter ego, went into the hospital back in August. A few days ago, Dan got a statement from the San Mateo Medical Center. The hospital charged Dan’s insurance company more than $10,000 for a 24 hour stay. The insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, decided that they would reimburse all but $546 of that amount. Dan now owes the San Mateo Medical Center $546.

So where does the $546 come from? Of course they didn’t tell Dan what that money paid for. The statement Dan received does not tell what that $10,000 went towards, nor does it tell what the insurance company refused to reimburse the hospital for.

Mr. Crankypants has got it all figured out. The hospital and the insurance company have figured out how much they can nick people for before they start to get complaints. You stay in the hospital for a day, they figure they can nick you for about half a grand. Oh, sure, if Dan were to ask them what that $546 went to pay for, they would make something up provide documentation listing all the charges, and they’d show that the insurance company refused to reimburse a few dollars here, a few dollars there — nothing that you could really complain about. And besides, Dan was in the hospital, right? He can’t deny that he got the treatment, right? (Of course he can’t deny he got the treatment, they kept him drugged up most of the time so he has very little idea what they did to him.) So Dan, being essentially stupid and good-natured, will pay up.

Mr. Crankypants, being essentially evil and mean-spirited, is in awe at the techniques of the hospitals and insurances companies. This takes greed to a whole new level. Yes, Mr. Crankypants is in awe.

“Fundamentalists in reverse”

Currently, I’m reading Sacred Song in America by Stephen Marini (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois, 2003). Marini is a religious historian who is probably best known for his studies of Revolutionary-era religion in North America (Marini has also founded a well-respected group that sings 18th century American choral music and Sacred Harp music, has composed music in the singing school tradition, and has edited a collection of such music).

One of the chapters in Sacred Song in America covers the conservatory tradition of sacred music. Half of this chapter consists of an interview with Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006), long-time music director and composer-in-residence at King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist church in Boston. There are many delightful moments in the interview, inculding Pinkham’s revelation that he was an atheist, and his story about how he got the New England Conservatory to stop having a prayer at commencement, and his comments on the singability of choral music, but I found this exchange particularly delightful:

Stephen Marini: The Unitarian tradition seem especially right for you, given your sense of things, because they are not going to push you on beliefs and doctrines and dogmas.

Daniel Pinkham: But Unitarian churches, they are fundamentalists in reverse!

Number 163 at the bottom

So on Sunday, a personal problem came up that made me cranky and upset — enough so that I had lots of crazy dreams and didn’t sleep well that night. To make it worse, Carol is back east right now, so I couldn’t talk with her about it. I woke up with a bit of a sore throat, feeling as if I was starting to come down with a cold. I called Carol and she calmed me down. But I still felt as if I were coming down with a cold — headache, aches and pains, sore throat, tired. The problem still loomed large in my thoughts.

I almost didn’t go to my Monday evening Sacred Harp singing group, but finally I decided I would go anyway. Sacred Harp singing carries on a long tradition of unaccompanied hymn singing that has been practiced in North America continuously since the 1720s. This is not whitebread church hymn singing, this is full-throated white spiritual singing, maybe not quite the thing you want to sing when you’ve got a bit of a sore throat. But I thought I would go, and leave when I started to feel tired.

You never know who’s going to show up at a Sacred Harp singing. We usually get 15 or so people on Monday evenings, but this week maybe 25 people showed up. A woman with the reputation of being a strong alto singer was visiting from Portland, and all the better regular singers seemed to show up this week. There were only four basses, two of whom were good strong experienced Sacred Harp singers, and two of us who most definitely were not. There I was, sitting on the front bench, where I didn’t belong, sitting there only because there weren’t enough experienced basses; there I was, feeling ill and tired, thinking that I would sing two or three songs and then go home.

That alto from from Portland was a powerful singer, and some of the regular singers were in fine voice, and the emotional temperature of the room kept rising. I got carried along. One of the experienced basses stood up and said he’d like to lead number 236; this is a long complicated anthem composed by William Billings in 1787, with several solos by the bass section; I had never sung it before; yet somehow I managed to sight-read the whole thing and never get lost and only hit one or two wrong notes; not due to any great musical skill on my part, but just getting carried along by the other singers. The emotional temperature kept rising. Someone stood up to lead number 365, a complicated lengthy song dating from 1765, with repeated chords based on open fifths, what rock guitarists call power chords, and with fuguing sections and polyphony, and somehow I managed to keep my place all the way through. I had to keep my place and keep singing; there was no choice not to; I had forgotten about going home early.

The other experienced bass stood up to lead number 163b, a slow, short, simple song. It was simple, but the trebles would hit some high notes in the sixth bar, and then the altos, especially that alto from Portland, would bend some long notes on a little descending run, and those altos would drive the tenors and us basses to blow out some high notes in the tenth and twelth bars — the only thing I can compare it to is when good jazz or blues musicians get going, and the different musicians keep pushing each other to get more intense with every repeating chorus — except this wasn’t jazz, and this wasn’t professional musicians, this was just us sitting around and hitting these emotional climaxes. And there was no one to hear us singing but us, and maybe God if you believe in a God who bothers to listen to us humans singing.

By this time, I was sweating with the effort of singing with such intensity, and my shirt was sticking to the back of the bench. We got done singing number 163b, and the leader paused for a moment in the sudden silence, looking a little stunned. He said quietly, “Wow. Thank you.” I thought maybe his legs were shaking just a little.

That was the high point. The rest was pretty good, too. By the time we got done, I was no longer cranky and upset, and I no longer felt the least bit ill. My problem was still there, it was still serious, but it no longer loomed large. It would be a good idea always to remember that singing, even amateur singing done not for performance but for the sheer joy of it, can heal you.

MySpace vs. Facebook

Reader Joe sent me a link to a fascinating story on NPR’s Website — Facebook skews towards white people; MySpace skews towards non-white people:

“I have friends who are white,” says 19-year-old Diego Luna. “They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That’s why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace.”

The class laughs nervously at his description, and then they agree. Benito Rodriguez, 16, adds, “Not to be racist or anything, but there’s more white kids on Facebook.”

Furthermore, Facebook skews towards more affluent people. MySpace, on the other hand, attracts more artists and lots more musicians.

Anybody want to guess how many Unitarian Universalist churches have MySpace pages?

Those subversive Unitarians, the way they go about freely associating…

Below you’ll find an excerpt from Violations of State Department Regulations and Pro-Castro Propaganda Activities in the United States, Part 2: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Eighth Congress, First Session, July 1 and 2 and August 5, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 474-475. Whatever you think of Mr. Randolph and his politics, what stands out for me is that the Palo Alto Unitarian Church was creating an open space for free association — James Luther Adams, one of our most prominent Unitarian theologians, contended that the freedom to associate was one of the best ways of keeping fascism at bay. (And yes, I know Castro’s Cuba was not very strong on the freedom to associate in 1963 — again, please be sure to separate Mr. Randolph’s politics, and Mr. Castro’s politics, with the actions of the church committee.) Continue reading →

Noted with bemusement

From A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally:

“Jerry and Sara were married on April 27, 1963, at the Palo Alto Unitarian Church, with a reception following at Rickey’s Hyatt House that included the music of the Wildwood Boys. It was the sort of wedding, several friends later observed, where the groom’s friends could be found stuffing their empty bellies at the food line, while the bride’s family members soothed their shaken nerves with drinks at the bar. The wedding was ‘tense,’ Garcia later recalled. ‘As far as the parents of my girlfriends… I’ve always been like Satan.’ Sara ‘was such a delicate fawn in my jungle.’ His best man was David Nelson, who felt scruffy around the Ruppenthals, although Willy Legate trumped him by attending in a T-shirt….

“[Phil Lesh] took the bus to Palo Alto, staggered into Kepler’s, then landed at the Chateau, the only refuge he could imagine, just a bit before the wedding.

“Five days after their ceremony, Jerry and Sara played together at the Tangent…. Sara had a good voice and they blended nicely…. Two weeks later the Hart Valley Drifters, with Garcia on banjo, Ken Frankel on mandolin, Hunter on bass, and Nelson on guitar, performed at the Monterey Folk Festival in the amateur division, winning Best Group. Garcia was also awarded Best Banjo Player….”

———

Um, yes, that was Jerry Garcia who got married here, back in his folk musician days, but that does not mean we are going to decorate the church in tie-dye. And I admit my disappointment — I was kinda hoping for a Terry Riley connection, or maybe Jello Biafra.

Nobel Prize Committee Troll Investigation

Oslo, Norway

A spokesperson for the Norwegian police confirmed that they are investigating whether the Nobel Prize Committee intended its award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama as a sophisticated form of trolling.

A source close to the investigation, who requested anonymity, confirmed that police here believe the award was designed to provoke U.S. bloggers and talk radio hosts into screaming themselves senseless.

In related stories, both Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh were rushed to local emergency rooms early this morning when they passed out after expressing their outrage that Mr. Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Moore reportedly collapsed when he screamed, “But he’s still escalating troop levels!” while Limbaugh collapsed after screaming, “Sarah Palin would’nt’ve allowed this, this is what happens in Obama’s America!”