Monthly Archives: September 2009

A word about practicing

The people next door to us host a drumming group. The drummers are practicing tonight. They are not very good. They are trying to do polyrhythms, but when you’re doing polyrhythms you have to be really precise or your drumming drifts in and out of chaos, which is what they’re doing. I understand that this is what one has to do when practicing, and I understand that drums are loud, but the least they could do is close the windows so the rest of the neighborhood doesn’t have to listen to their mistakes. But too many amateur musicians are so enamored of themselves that they forget how excruciating their practice is to others.

I experienced this phenomenon this past summer at a summer conference. A young man was trying to learn a guitar part from a recording. He sat in one of the common rooms of the conference center. He played little bits from the recording, and then tried to work out the guitar solo. I’m sure that inside his head it all sounded so wonderful, but to me it was just painful to listen to the same little recorded bits over and over, and then hear him make the same mistakes over and over. Most amateur musicians are considerate and practice in private; but the ones who aren’t, and don’t, are really annoying.

Bookstore

It’s about a twenty or thirty minutes walk from our house to downtown Burlingame. Instead of going into the city tonight, I decided to walk over to Burlingame. I walked past the stores with expensive women’s clothing, past the Apple store, past Pottery Barn and Banana Republic, finding with unerring instinct the local independent bookstore.

I wandered down to the current events section, which was right next to the children’s section. Near me, a man was standing next to a boy who was about 8 years old.

“Dad, look at this book,” said the boy.

The man mumbled a reply. He was looking at something else.

“But Dad,” said the boy with more urgency in his voice, “look at this book.”

“What?” said the man.

“This book,” said the boy, showing it to his father. “It has Legos with the book.” His voice sounded slightly awestruck: a book with Legos!

“Cool,” said the father, with some enthusiasm, which he spoiled by immediately turning to call to his wife across the store, “Did you see the children’s section? They have a good children’s section here.”

I wandered over to the mystery books. There were two other children behind me looking at books. A man, presumably their father, walked over, and said, “OK, it’s time for the —— family to go now.” There was just the slightest hint of uncertainty in his voice.

The children ignored him.

“C’mon, guys, let’s please put the books back now,” said the tentative father.

The children ignored him.

“Don’t you guys want to get ice cream?” he said.

“Ice cream?” they cried.

“Yeah!” he said, putting their books back on the shelf for them.

I suddenly noticed that there was one other solo adult in the bookstore; everyone else appeared to be part of a family of adults and children. I went over to the science fiction books, which again was near the big children’s section. Yet another parent was standing in the children’s section talking to a child.

“Put the book back,” said the parent.

“WAAH!” screamed the child.

“OK, we’ll buy the book,” said the parent to stop the child from crying. This reminded me of when I visited a toy shop in a well-to-do white suburb for ten years, where someone I know was the manager. Behind the cash register, the staff had posted a sign that read, “Unattended children will be sold into slavery.”

Unusually for me, I didn’t buy anything at this bookstore.

UU children’s choir 2010

I just got the announcement for the 2010 Unitarian Universalist Children’s Choir. This is basically a five-day children’s choir camp which culminates in a performance at General Assembly. I have talked with parents of children who have participated in past UU Children’s choirs, and they say it’s a fabulous experience. Children whose birthdays fall between 28 June 1997 and 22 June 2000 are encouraged to apply. The last UU Children’s choir was in 2006, and the next one won’t be for another 3 years, so this is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Applications, including a recorded audition, are due October 20. More information at www.uucc2010.com.

Phoebe

Fifteen minutes ago, Amy, the lead minister here, walked into my office. “Do you know anything about birds?” she said to me.

Without really looking up, I pointed to the pair of binoculars and the two field guides on my desk. “Yeah, I’m into birds,” I said.

She held out her hand, on which was perched a small songbird. “I found this little guy outside my office,” she said, “and wondered if he’s all right.”

“Black Phoebe,” I said, still not quite registering that the bird was quite calmly perching on her hand. “He looks OK. Maybe he needs water?” The phoebe continued to perch on Amy’s hand while I went off and got a tray. The bird moved its head and looked around. I said to Amy, “You’re like St. Francis or something.” I put some water in the tray. When Amy bent down to put the phoebe next to the tray of water, the phoebe suddenly flew away and perched inside Amy’s office.

After we got over being startled, we both laughed. “Well,” I said, “looks like there’s nothing wrong with that bird.”

“But why was it sitting there on the sidewalk?” said Amy.

“Maybe a hawk went by,” I said, spinning out a plausible hypothesis; I had seen an immature Cooper’s Hawk just outside my office a couple of weeks ago. “The phoebe was sitting there avoiding the hawk. In fact, now that I think of it, all the birds stopped singing a few minutes ago, which is what they do when a hawk goes by. Then this big mammal came along and picks up the phoebe.”

The phoebe stayed inside Amy’s office for about five minutes, watching her eat her lunch. She didn’t see it go. When I poked my head in her office to see if the phoebe had gone, it flew back in and immediately back out again.

“Jeez,” I said, “you really are like St. Francis.”

“One of my favorite saints,” said Amy.

Autumn watch

A gentle rain is falling outside the door.

This is September, when you expect the Bay Area to be sunny and hot; but sometimes a little bit of fall rain arrives early. But yesterday we had thunder storms move through, big dark clouds moving across the bay, and just enough rain to disturb the summer’s accumulation of dust on my car. When I got up this morning, the sky was still cloudy — not just low stratus clouds, some fog bank that had been pushed up a few hundred feet above the ground, but real clouds. The sun tried to peek through the clouds in the middle of the day, but towards sunset the clouds had grown thicker.

And now it’s raining — not much, not enough to need a rain coat or even an umbrella, but just enough slow gentle rain to settle the dust and stir up smells from the earth and the plants. The air feels damp and warm. Surely it will get hot and dry again before the winter rains come in earnest, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the gentle rain.

Participatory singing

So how can we get congregations to sing better? I’m not a very good musician, but I’m a pretty good teacher, and if you think like a teacher the obvious thing to do is to teach your congregation how to sing. Once you have that big, broad goal, you can break it down into manageable chunks. Now I admit that I have never taught a congregation how to sing well enough that they spontaneously sing in harmony, but I have taught smaller groups how to do so, and there’s an obvious progression of steps to take:

(1) Learn a core group of songs/hymns so that everyone knows them well. You choose the core songs for their theological relevance, singability, and beauty. It helps if they are easy to memorize.

(2) Sing those songs repeatedly until most of the people in the group know them well.

(3) Teach simple harmony parts for the core songs. Singing the songs with minimal or no accompaniment helps everyone to really learn the songs and harmony without relying on the crutch of a piano or guitar.

(4) Sing the core songs with their harmony parts until most of the people in the group know them well — well enough that as soon as you start singing one of the core songs, the people who know the harmony parts spontaneously start singing in harmony.

I’ve outlined this as a neat and tidy progression of teaching tasks, but in real life it’s not that neat and tidy. You might start by teaching one song and immediately adding harmony parts; then gradually adding other songs, some with harmony and some without. The exact path you follow will always depend on the teacher’s abilities and the chemistry of the group being taught. But in every case, the goal is the same: to have the group learn a core group of songs with harmony parts.

Such a plan would not do away with choirs, soloists, and/or professional musicians — choirs and soloists can help support us ordinary singers, and sometimes we like to just sit and listen to really good musicians. I also think such a plan would help us damp down the fights over church music style — when you’re sitting and listening as a passive consumer of music you have every right to be picky about the style of music you are being forced to listen to, whereas when everyone’s singing together we are more likely to understand that all musics are created equal (as Peter Schiekele used to say).

What would this plan look like in the actual worship life of a congregation? Continue reading →

Singing in harmony

We had our teacher training here at the Palo Alto church this morning. There were 25 people present, and at one point, partly as an experiment, I taught the group a simple Zulu song, “Thula” (available in The Folk Choir Song Book). I am neither a trained choir director nor a particularly good musician. Our group today had some people who are good singers, but most of the group probably only sings at karaoke and campfires. Yet in five minutes, I had the whole group singing in three-part harmony. We sounded fabulous.

Some of us were talking about this after the training. We agreed that society at large trains us to understand ourselves as consumers of music product. We do not have the sense that participating in music is a normal part of human life. And even our churches have become places where the music is produced only by professionals (and trained amateurs), while the majority of us have become passive consumers of music. We don’t even have church karaoke, for Pete’s sake.

Mostly, I think — at least mostly in Unitarian Universalist congregations — no one takes the time to really teach congregations how to sing. We let the professionals do the music for us, or we let the trained amateurs sing for us, and we sing limply along on the hymns (hymns which are rarely in keys suitable for our untrained voices). Sometimes the music professionals do things like offering hymn sings before the worship service, which increases the volume a little bit but does not make the congregation sound fabulous. Sometimes the ministers choose hymns which are fun to sing, rather than choosing hymns where the words fit the theme of the sermon, but still the congregation doesn’t sound as fabulous as they could.

Singing harmony in a large group can cause beneficial physiological changes in people; it can induce transcendent experiences; it can cause little children to dance and sway in time to the music. Why do we settle for anything less than singing so we sound fabulous?

Read the follow-up post.

On Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley

This evening, I was browsing in a used bookstore. The man standing at the cash register was talking with two women. He had a ponytail and a beatific smile. I noticed one of the women wore a bright orange t-shirt. They were having a long conversation, and I didn’t pay much attention to what they were saying.

But then I happened to be browsing through the used sheet music, idly hoping to find Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” when I heard the woman with the orange t-shirt say, “Do you have any Bibles?”

“Right over here,” said the man, and walked over to show her the Bibles, which happened to be right behind me.

“Have you ever read the Bible?” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said the man. “Several times, in fact. But I don’t believe in it. I guess I’m more of a Hindu.”

“How come you don’t believe in the Bible?” said the woman innocently.

The man proceeded to rehash some of the old arguments of the Higher Criticism, getting one or two of them wrong. I made it a point to wander away to different part of the store. I felt tempted to involve myself in the discussion and make corrections, but I also felt that perhaps they were flirting a little bit and I didn’t want to interrupt them.

The man had to go back to the cash register to take care of a customer. When the customer had gone, the woman in the orange t-shirt went over and continued the discussion: “How come you don’t believe in the Bible? Don’t you worry about what will happen after you die? Because life is short, but what happens afterwards lasts much longer.”

“Well,” said the man, still smiling, “I can’t be a Christian because I can’t believe in a God that would damn people to hell. Either everyone goes to heaven after they die, or I can’t believe in God.”

He continued at great length, and I restrained myself from bursting into their conversation and saying, Ah ha, you are stating the case for classic Universalism as set forth by Hosea Ballou…. — as I say, I restrained myself, because by now I could sense that the woman was not as innocent as she appeared at first. She was determined to save this poor man’s soul, to bring him to Christ, or whatever phraseology might be used by her particular sect or denomination. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see from her body language how intent she was. I could also see from her body language that she was still flirting with him.

At last I couldn’t wait any longer; I wanted to buy a few books and move on. “Excuse me,” I said, walking up to the cash register. “I hate to interrupt your conversation, but…”

The man, still smiling beatifically, cheerfully took my money. The woman stood there, intent, silent. Her t-shirt was very orange.

I picked up my books, saying, “And now I’ll let you get back to your theological discussion.” By the time I had turned away, they were at it again.

I walked back out onto Telegraph Avenue, dodged the drunks, the addicts, and the homeless, wove my way through the well-dressed college students, the hippies, and a few middle-aged suburbanites, until I got to the next used bookstore.