Category Archives: Arts & culture

Utah Phillips is dead

Bruce “Utah” Phillips died on on Friday. Commenter Dan Schatz tells us:

Sadly, we lost Utah on Friday. He died peacefully in his sleep next to his wife. Utah had been a founding member of his [Unitarian Universalist] fellowship in Nevada City, CA, and though he often made light of his UUism, it was extremely important to him. He was sometimes known as “U. Utah Phillips” (a take-off on the country singer T. Texas Tyler); a few weeks ago I joked with him that it stood for “Unitarian.” “Well, you figured it out,” he said.

The various benefit concerts and other projects that were planned for Utah are still going ahead, as a memorial and a way to make sure Utah’s family remains well supported. If one of the concerts is in your area, I advise you to go to it. If you see a Utah Phillips CD, pick it up — the songs will astound you with their beauty.

Thanks for letting us all know, Dan. On the the Utah Phillips Web site, his son Duncan reports:

Utah’s wish was to not be embalmed and laid to rest in a plain, hand made wooden coffin to expedite his return to the earth, which we will honor. He will be laid to rest in the cemetery down the road from his home in Nevada City.

Ecologically sensible, just as you’d expect — what a good last act of a profoundly caring life. As soon as I finish typing this, I think I’ll go find a Utah Phillips CD and listen to it. Obituaries and press notices after the jump… Continue reading →

Utah Phillips

Utah Phillips, the folk musician with the big white beard and the great stories, has been having some health issues recently. Last Wednesday his son, Duncan, posted a letter from Utah here — the gist of which is that Utah Phillips is doing better, but still faces major health challenges.

Like many of his fans, I like Utah Phillips not just for his music and his hilarious stories, but for his integrity and for his commitment to social justice, and yeah, I’m proud to claim him as a co-religionist (he’s part of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Nevada City). Looks like I won’t get a chance to hear him in concert again, but at least he’s still alive and writing songs and podcasting.

People across the country are hosting benefit concerts for Utah Phillips — Pete Seeger and Dar Williams held a benefit concert for Phillips back in April, at which time Seeger pointed out that folk singers don’t get health benefits as part of the job. There’s a benefit concert coming up in Chicago on June 14, and no doubt more to come.

I almost never post other people’s videos on this blog, but — in case you’ve never experienced him live, here’s a taste of Utah Phillips singing and telling stories at what must have been one of his last appearances before he stopped performing. The story about his daughter (about five minutes in) is hilarious:

Or you could listen to this, his most famous story.

Churches as over-55 communities

Mr. Crankypants loves Julius Lester. On his blog, he wrote this delightfully snarky post that sounds like it’s about politics, but is really about generational differences. Writing about Hillary Clinton, Lester points out that “her ideas are old.” In of itself this is not an original thought, but Lester goes on to add: “She’s 60, and she sounds like she hasn’t had a new thought in the past 40 years. I say this as someone who is 9 years older than she is, so I know an old idea when I hear it.”

Mr. Crankypants smells a new generation gap. The Baby Boom generation is so doggone big that they wind up spending most of their time talking to one another, not to younger people, and avoiding new ideas. And because they are such a big market, capitalist culture caters to their every whim to the point where they can pretty much insulate themselves from many new ideas in the world. As someone who lives at the tail end of the Baby Boom (being a few months older than Barack Obama), Mr. Crankypants knows this to be true — if he wanted to, he could spend all his time hanging out with people a few years older than himself and talking about the great music of the 1960s and the great literature of the 1960s and the great political movements of the 1960s, etc., none of which have ever been equaled, blah blah blah. (Actually, Mr. C. hates the 1960s, but you get the idea.) Baby Boomers tend to be full of old ideas, even when they think they are full of new ideas.

Not that anyone at this blog is much of a supporter of Barack Obama. It’s tough to get thrilled about a rhetorician who is further to the right than, and probably just as authoritarian as, Richard Nixon; and who doesn’t seem to understand what it means to be a member of a church to boot. But this isn’t a post about politics, this is a post that uses politics as an example of this new generation gap.

For another example of how how this new generation gap seems to work, we need look no further than racism. Julius Lester has this to say about Hillary Clinton: “Even worse, however, is her pandering to white racism has made us a far more racially divided nation than we were before her march to the White House was stopped by Barack Obama. I cannot ever forgive her for that.” But it’s not Hillary Clinton alone who tends to pander to racist tendencies — the Baby Boom generation as a whole tends to do the same thing. It seems to Mr. Crnakypants that many Baby Boomers (of all skin colors) believe that American racism got solved in the 1960s, between the Civil Rights movement (if they’re white) or the Black Power movement (if they’re black). Those old ideas tend to miss the fact that since 1980 racism has mutated and gotten more virulent, and it no longer responds to the old cures. Thus in Unitarian Universalism, Baby Boomers are still using second wave feminist techniques to try to fight racism, without seeing that second wave feminist techniques like consciousness-raising and identity groups were designed for a racism that no longer exists (nor do they see the class bias inherent in those techniques, but that’s another conversation).

And don’t assume this new generation gap (no capitals) is like the old Generation Gap of the 1960s, because they’re utterly different. The younger generations today aren’t bothering with open rebellion, as allegedly happened in the 1960s, they’re just creating new forms and ideas without bothering to talk much to the Baby Boomers.

So how is this new generation gap playing out in liberal churches? The Baby Boomers are in firm control of our local churches and our denomination, now that the GI Generation has started dying off. Baby Boomers are setting up the churches to suit their needs and their worldview, with the result that younger generations are staying away in droves. Our churches are starting to look like those over-55 communities where children and younger adults are allowed to visit but not stay for very long. This is perhaps most obviously manifested in the intensive efforts to create “young adult programming,” which sounds good on paper but in practice functions pretty much like those restrictive covenants in over-55 communities.

Mr. Crankypants is thinking about making stickers that say, “This Church Is An Over-55 Community,” the idea being that you could buy such a sticker and slap it on your church’s sign when no one is looking. Truth in advertising, don’t you know.

Getting mad, Perry Mason style

A discussion of tactics between the lawyer Perry Mason and the private detective Paul Drake that occurs on page 128 of The Case of the Amorous Aunt by Erle Stanley Gardner:

“ ‘Tomorrow I’m going to be dignified, injured, and perhaps just a little dazed by the rapidity of developments.’

“ ‘Are you going to be an injured martyr or are you going to get mad?’ Drake asked.

“ ‘It depends on which way will do my client the most good,’ Mason told him.

“ ‘My best hunch is that you should get mad,’ Drake said.

“ ‘We’ll think it over,’ Mason said.

“ ‘Won’t you get mad anyway?’ Drake said.

“ ‘A good lawyer can always get mad if somebody pays him for it, but after you’ve been paid a few times for getting good and mad, you hate like the deuce to get mad on your own when nobody’s paying you for it.’

“Drake grinned. ‘You lawyers,’ he said.”

Well. I feel a little odd agreeing with a fictional lawyer, but it occurs to me that that religious professionals are wasting their time if they get mad while at church, unless they’re getting paid to get mad. I guess what I mean to say is this: while getting mad is a natural reaction to many things that happen in church life, you rarely get anything out of getting mad, except getting mad.

Not that I think we should draw life lessons from a pulp fiction hero.

Martin Marty nails it

Martin Marty writes about the Barack Obama / Jeremiah Wright ruckus in the most recent issue of Christian Century magazine. Marty begins by saying: “This spring a certain Christian layperson has been criticized for not exiting his local church when he disagreed with something his pastor preached.” Just framing the Obama/Wright ruckus in this way shows how silly the whole thing is. Good grief, if everyone who disagreed with something I’ve preached left First Unitarian in New Bedford, the pews would be empty.

Perhaps Obama is just showing what is probably true of every American politician — that he values his political ambitions more than he values a religious community that has nurtured him and his family. Maybe that’s just the price you have to pay to become president of the United States, and maybe if you’re a black man playing politics in the United States the price is a lot higher — after all, we have heard nothing about McCain’s minister, or Clinton’s minister, yet surely they have each said things that would be politically embarrassing. And none of this reflects well on the American political process.

Well, you should go read Marty’s column (Link) — it’s funny and made me laugh. Given the sorry state of this presidential election, I needed a good laugh.

Overtones

On Sunday afternoon at the New England Folk Festival, I went to hear a small choral group perform. I had been looking forward to hearing them; but I had to leave after one song. They sang into microphones, even though the room was fairly small and reasonably resonant. I couldn’t pick out which person was singing which line of the music, since the sound of actual voices was completely swallowed up in the sound from the loudspeakers, and I found this disconcerting.

Worse, microphones and loudspeakers remove something from the sound of singing. The previous day, I had been in the same room to hear a six-voice a capella men’s group sing folk songs and sacred music from the Republic of Georgia. They did not use microphones. As a result, when they hit certain chords, you could hear the high overtones ringing in the room. These sounds had a physical effect on my body — you can feel such harmony in your body. Amplifiers and loudspeakers strip away most of the overtones, thus making listening to singing a more passive experience.

(All this might help explain why I dislike amplified church choirs.)

Easy four-part gospel

One of the workshops I took at the New England Folk Festival this past weekend was called “Easy Four Part Gospel.” The workshop was led by Sol Weber, who is best known for his monumental collection of rounds. Maybe forty people showed up for the workshop, Sol Weber divided us into four sections — soprano, alto, tenor, bass — and he handed out sheet music. For the first number, he taught us the four different parts, but after that we just sight-read the music.

Now, I am not a great singer, and while I can read music I don’t do sight-singing. But when I discovered that when I was sitting with maybe ten other people, at least three of whom do know how to sight-sing, I could sight-sing the bass part of an easy gospel song without too much trouble. It was a classic example of how the shared knowledge of a group can help a deficient individual (me, in this case) perform above his/her level of ordinary competence.

Plus it was a heck of a lot of fun. So now I’m wondering if I can teach others at church how to sing four-part gospel songs, just so I can have the fun of singing that music once again….

Shape note singing & today’s hymnody

At the New England Folk Festival, one of the workshops I attended was an introduction to shape note singing. Shape note singing is a tradition of hymn singing that stretches back to the singing schools established by North American ministers in the second half of the 18th C. as a way to improve congregational singing. The shape note tradition began in New England with composers like William Billings (1746-1800) of Boston, moved south where it produced books like The Southern Harmony in 1854, and held on into the 20th C. in Appalachia and a few other out-of-the-way regions. Finally, starting about 1975 shape note singing enjoyed a nation-wide renaissance with singing groups from New England to California (link to list of regional singings). Thus shape note singing is an indigenous North American musical tradition with an unbroken two-and-a-quarter-century history.

At the workshop I attended, I learned the basics of one shape-note tradition. The music is sung in four parts (sometimes three parts) and is printed in a distinctive style of musical notation where the note-heads have different shapes depending on the pitch. The singing style is full-throated and open, even a little nasal. The singers are always arranged in a square divided into four sections: tenors or leads (they carry the melody) in one section; sopranos or trebles to their right; altos to the right of sopranos; and basses to the right of the altos and the left of the leads. The center of this square is left open and whoever is leading a given hymn stands in the center facing the tenors, and beats time (the front row of tenors also beat time for those who can’t see the song leader).

As a working minister, what really struck me is the gap between singing shape-note hymns for an hour sitting in a square on the one hand, and the realities of incorporating hymn-singing into real-life liturgy on the other hand. Shape-note singing started as a singing school, a way to teach ordinary people how to sight-read four-part harmony; the singing master would come to your town for six weeks or some months, and lots of people would learn how to sing shape-note hymns, and then the singing master would go away and (in theory, at least) a big percentage of your congregation would have some basic music skills. Of course, when you use shape-note hymns in a worship service, I can’t see that you would have everyone sit in a square, and divide up your congregation by tenors, sopranos, etc. But the shape-note hymnal embodies the teaching method of the singing master.

What particularly interested me is that shape-note singing connects a specific hymnal with the pedagogical method (teaching people how to sight-read music, etc.). Hymnals such as The Scared Harp are both teaching tools, and liturgical resources. Compare that to the hymnal that I use everyday, Singing the Living Tradition, which seems to be written by musicians for other musicians; there is no concession made to the non-musician, and there are no singing schools to help people how to use that hymnal. The new Unitarian Universalist hymnal supplement, Singing the Journey, makes even less of a concession to non-musicians — most of the hymns require an accomplished or professional accompanist, some of the hymns stretch out over six pages (requiring three page turns) — while it contains some beautiful music, it’s really a hymnal for trained soloists and choir directors, not a hymnal for the average member of a congregation. Having peeked into the hymnals of other denominations, I think this is a widespread problem.

Contrast a hymnal like Singing the Journey with the group singing songbook Rise Up Singing. Rise Up includes only lyrics and simple chord progressions, no musical notation — you either have to know a song, or you have to have a song leader who can lead the song. Rise Up has a pedagogical method implicit in it:– you learn to sing by singing songs you’re already familiar with, and then when you gain confidence you’re willing to learn new songs that are led campfire-style (mostly unison singing, with simple guitar strumming) by a song leader. I’ve used both Rise Up and Singing the Living Tradition extensively, and in my experience, Rise Up is much better at empowering average singers to simply sing.

I’m not suggesting that we replace our hymnal with Rise Up Singing (although I have used Rise Up successfully in worship services). But we could learn this from shape note singing:– every hymnal could include a coherent pedagogical method that will improve the skills of the average singer.