Song for a workweek's end 2

It’s Friday again. Another long week perhaps? I seem to be on a music run and that's probably because the workweeks have indeed been long here lately. Try this song to close out the week, "The Once and Future Carpenter" by the Avett Brothers, from their album The Carpenter.

My son introduced me to the Avett Brothers about five years ago when he and his buddy played their album I and Love and You, including the title song with it’s line "Brooklyn Brooklyn Take Me Home," on repeat while painting rooms in our house to earn the money for their one-way plane tickets to NYC after college graduation. While the music played, I sat at my computer in the adjacent room, trying to work, trying to swallow down the lump in my throat. I like the Avett Brothers’ sound, and the thoughts and emotions in their songs, but they are always linked in my mind to those boys singing along on the threshold of adventure, that moment of leaving something behind and pursuing what’s next, of continuing to become who you’re going to become. This song speaks to that, to living the life you’re given.

The song’s refrain:

Forever I will move like the world that turns beneath me
And when I lose my direction I'll look up to the sky
And when the black cloak drags upon the ground
I'll be ready to surrender, and remember
Well we're all in this together
If I live the life I'm given, I won’t be scared to die

Click here to read an interview with the Avett Brothers from Entertainment Weekly about their album The Carpenter.

Enjoy!

~~~

Twenty Feet from Stardom: Are you a back-up singer?

It’s not a huge leap from thinking about the work of back-up singing to thinking about work in general, all kinds of jobs and all kinds of workers, including the professional superstars who’ve worked their career magic and found their places at the top, and those people who are to the side and beneath.

If you haven’t seen the documentary, I really recommend you do so. You can watch it streaming on Netflix. The video I’ve embedded in this post is a five-minute featurette about the documentary. In this video, director Morgan Neville has this to say about how viewers relate to the stories of these back-up singers:

"I was at the Minneapolis Film Festival and afterwards a guy stood up and said, 'I’m a middle manager at a software company here. I’ve been working for twenty years, I work with a team of people, I’m proud of the people I work with, I’m proud of our product. I don’t get all the title of the money in the world, and I just realized, I’m a back-up singer.'"

Neville continues:

"We all feel to some extent that we live in that gulf between our childhood dreams and the reality of our real life.”  Even though these women had incredible talent, and you keep thinking, Isn’t it a shame that they’re not a star?, what you realize is they’ve found their own way to be happy and that’s way more important than being famous."

~~~

Can't get it out of my head

A song keeps playing in my head. "Be Here Now" by Mason Jennings, a local guy who just released a new CD called Boneclouds. I think this is his sixth CD. My college freshman (oops, he's a sophomore now) introduced me to Jennings' music a couple years ago and I've been a fan since.

In fact, a couple weeks ago my son let me go with him and two of his friends to a concert Jennings gave at a local independent record store.

I'm not a music critic and so don't have handy the best descriptors of musical performance but let me just say that there is something lovely and good-spirited about his music. He's on a tour right now, so if you hear he's in your city check him out. Tomorrow night he's in New York City, the next Philadelphia, the next Washington DC, and more. Check out his website for concert info and some videos, including "Be Here Now" and if you're there listen also to "Sorry Signs on Cash Machines", another great song. My son even wrote a paper about him for school and turned his professor into a fan--maybe he'll give me a copy and I'll add an excerpt.

Bach and the struggle against mediocrity

Ever since my tenth-grade piano teacher started me on a book of Bach Two-Part Inventions I've loved all things Bach. Many years later (!) the book is now quite tattered with the cover missing and pages loose but I still like to take it out from time to time and fumble around the keyboard trying to regain some trace of what I used to be able to play.

The preface to the book includes this compelling claim: "Even at the present day, assiduous practice of these Inventions will be of the utmost utility to each and every talented student of piano-forte-playing who wishes to rise above mediocrity ..." [emphasis mine]. I don't remember reading this preface when I was learning to play these pieces. I certainly don't recall the wish "to rise above mediocrity" as my motivator for practicing them. My motivators were more likely wanting to please my teacher (or more to the point, to avoid that disappointed look on his face) and simply loving how the Inventions sounded. Looking back, if practicing them was also helping me to rise above mediocrity without my realization, it was all to my benefit.

This week I discovered a website that offers a stream of Bach keyboard music via RealPlayer, including at least one Two-Part Invention. I recommend it to you as lovely music to have on while working or reading. And maybe even in the listening it will provide a surreptitious boost above mediocrity.

Click here for Radio B.A.C.H..

Music for a Good Friday

Today is Good Friday. In Girl Meets God, Lauren Winner writes, "Good Friday is where that one grave and theological term, incarnation, most pointedly meets that other grave and theological term, atonement. Hanging there on the Cross, bleeding and in pain, He (and the capital H is especially important, as not just anyone's suffering would have had the same result) atones for our sins. Theologians have endlessly debated theories of the atonement, but on this basic fact all orthodox Christians can agree: through Christ's atoning work on the Cross, we fallen sinner are reconciled with God."

As I write this post, the song "Gethsemane", from Jesus Christ Superstar is playing in iTunes. I have it on repeat. About five years ago, I bought the 20th anniversary London cast recording of the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Ever since, it's become a bit of a Good Friday tradition with me to listen to at least part of it. This song in particular. Yes, the theology of Rice and Webber errs a bit too far on the "fully human" nature of Jesus, at the expense of his simulataneous "fully divine" nature. But to be reminded that Jesus was fully human on the day that commemorates his suffering and death is a good thing. It's too easy to think that the fully divine aspect of his nature somehow took over and made the whole experience less than torture. Mel Gibson's, Passion of the Christ accomplished this also. Who could watch that movie and not understand the human pain involved?

Back to Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember being a young teenager when it first came out and playing the record over and over again. I remember writing the lyrics to "Gethsemane" into a notebook in purple ink while tears streamed down my cheeks. This song still waters my eyes. Recently I learned that a friend of mine came to faith as a teenager on a Good Friday afternoon while alone in her room listening to Ian Gillan ("Jesus" in the original recording) sing the work of Webber and Rice.

The Gospels quote Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane as telling his disciples that he was "grieved to the point of death" and praying to God that if it was possible to "let this cup pass from me," as he sweat "drops of blood."  The lyrics to and performance of Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say) effectively capture this agony.

To hear a few bars, click here. Alternatively, for 99 cents  you could download from iTunes an mp3 of the song as sung by Ian Gillan in the original (remastered) recording. For half the price of a cup of coffee, see if it doesn't move you too on this Good Friday afternoon.

How can I keep from singing?

Frederick and Mary Ann Brussat from Spirituality & Health are currently offering an e-course called “Practicing Spirituality with Protestants.” It started on Ash Wednesday.  I meant to put a note about it on this blog weeks ago, before the course started, to tell you all about it, but regretfully, I didn't get it done. The Brussats periodically offer these e-courses. I’ve signed up forseveral (“Practicing Spirituality with Catholics,” “Practicing Spirituality with Anglicans,” and “Practicing Spirituality with Jesus: A Journey for Lent”) and have always found them interesting.

Every day an e-mail is sent to those who signed up for the course. The e-mail contains a thought-provoking book excerpt plus a suggested activity for the day related to the theme of the day’s excerpt.

This past Sunday, the e-course featured the theme of “Hymn Singing,” which is “one of the most popular” among the “classic Protestant practices.” Brussat writes, “ In the days when Catholics were still saying the Mass in Latin, you knew you were passing a Protestant church when you heard congregational singing coming from the building.”

That’s the tradition I in which I grew up and still worship. A tradition of wonderful hymns and enthusiastic heartfelt singing. Theology, melody, harmony, and rhythm make a good marriage. One that sticks. The words and the music that I learned as a child are still deep inside me, yet easily rise to the surface with a single chord.

The e-course suggests to “go into a Protestant church this Sunday and join in the singing. Don't worry if you don't think you sing well or don't know all the hymns. You probably won't be the only one. What matters is what you bring to this practice -- devotion and enthusiasm. To describe what we mean, we

offer these directions for singing from John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and the brother of Charles, who wrote many hymns, including ‘Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.’" (An aside, these directions from Wesley are also in the hymnal of my church, “The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook.”)

DIRECTIONS FOR SINGING

by John Wesley

* Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn as many as you please.

* Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.

* Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength.

* Sing modestly. Do not bawl, so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may not destroy the harmony; but strive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound.

* Sing in time. Whatever time is sung be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it; but attend close to the leading voices, and move therewith as exactly as you can; and take care not to sing too slow.

* Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually.

If you want to hear a CD of classic Protestant hymns sung with guitar and beautiful harmonies, check out by the CD, “Hymns: Streams of Mercy” by The Frantzich Brothers. Some free .mp3 downloads are available on their site.

In my church this last Sunday we sang, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “O Sacred Heart, Now Wounded,” both classic Lent hymns. The third verse of “O Sacred Heart” never fails to move me:

“What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend,
for this thy dying sorrow, thy pity without end?
O make me thine forever; and should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to thee.”

not Fred and Ginger; not Richard and Jennifer

Learning something new isn't easy. Particularly if it involves walking backwards with an occasional dip or twirl.

This week, my husband and I had our first "Beginning Ballroom Dancing" class through an adult education program at a local high school. Our registration was motivated in part by a desire to do something together and a bit different and in part by the movie Shall We Dance?, starring Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez, who made ballroom dancing for the beginner look fun and oh-so-easy.

We spent the evening learning the s-l-ow--s-l-o-w--quick/quick step of the fox trot--and other steps of other dances that I've already forgotten--to the music of Bobby Darin (think: "Beyond the Sea"). It should come as no surprise that we weren't exactly Richard and Jennifer. My less-than-successful efforts to move in a coordinated fashion across the school gymnasium floor reminded me of my junior-high years when I would ask every physical education teacher if she graded on effort rather than accomplishment. Predictably, the response was never the one I wanted. In fact, one teacher--knowing my more academic interests--had the spunk to reply, "And would you expect a math teacher to grade only on effort?" It would have been useless to argue.

Thankfully, our dance teacher will give no grade.

We may not have been Richard and Jennifer on the dance floor, but that's ok. Borrowing the words of Martha Stewart, "it's a good thing" to be just ordinary people in a group of ordinary people, all of whom are trying something new and being willing to look a little ridiculous in the process. (Although it must be said that some couples in the group looked a little less ridiculous than others. Clearly these couples registered for the wrong class or else planted themselves among us beginners to either taunt us in our ineptness or spur us on to success through their example.)

Reasons why it's a good thing:

• Excercise? Yes!
• Doing vs. watching? Yes!
• Learning a new thing? Yes!
• Development of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence? Yes!
• Involvement in our community? Yes!
• Romance? Yes! (Once we get past glaring at each other for missteps :))
• Excuse to later buy a new fancy dress? Yes!
• Preparedness for future ball invitations? Yes! :)

There are worse ways to spend a cold January evening.