Tag Archives: music

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Retreat

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The Ketola family were Finnish immigrants who settled in Wisconsin just before the turn of the 20th century.  Their daughter had scoliosis and was mostly bedridden from the age of 20 until her death at age 40.  When her parents died (in their 90s!), her brothers took care of her.  They bought her a parlor piano and set it up in her bedroom so that they could keep up a public appearance of humble simplicity by closing the door when visitors came.  It wouldn’t do to have the neighbors think they’d squandered their earnings on such a luxury!  The brothers never married and lived in the house without electricity or plumbing well into the 1960s.  They had electricity in the barn, though, for milking. 

Your family, your bed, and your music.  That sounds like a nice retreat to me!  Healing wishes to all….

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This Space Reserved

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Today’s date is reserved for a blog about my mother-in-law, who was born on this day.  However, I just don’t have time to do Marni justice, since I didn’t get home from work until 6:30, made dinner, walked to the market and am now eagerly anticipating the arrival of my oldest daughter and her First Mate for a sleepover visit and Sunday breakfast, after which I go back to work until 6pm again.  I apologize for the disappointment, but promise to do my best to honor her at a later time.  Here’s a teaser about this beloved person: she was a concert pianist.  She played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16.  Yeah.  And as a grandma, she was a computer game geek.  You’re gonna love her.  

Jim, his mom, and Ach du Wee Bear.

 

 

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Friday Night Dancing

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After the living history museum closes and I’m finished my work for the day as an interpreter in St. Peter’s Church, I’m changing out of my corset and bustle and into modern day country dancing togs!  There’s a barn dance tonight in the octagonal barn.  Square dancing is something that I’ve enjoyed since grade school when Mr. Maghita, the gym teacher, would call out the squares and teach us to promenade, doe-see-doe, and allemande left with our classmates.  I didn’t even mind the boy cooties.  Even better, though, was the Girl Scout square dances when I got to dance with my father.  Which reminds me of a funny story….

  On my 15th birthday, my older sister Sarah and I were staying with my father at the historic Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs.  We had just delivered my sister Alice to the University of Colorado, Fort Collins and were heading back to California.  As we checked in, I noticed a sign in the lobby advertising that there would be square dancing on the patio that evening.  It sounded like a perfect way to celebrate my birthday, so after dinner, we made our way out to the terrace.  I noticed that there were a lot of people dressed in square dancing outfits – ladies in ruffled skirts that stuck straight out, gents with string ties and cowboy boots.  I lamented the fact that I hadn’t really packed for this occasion.  I also wondered why all these people had pinned on name tags with the same logo.  As the music started, people started squaring up, and my father promised me the first dance and asked my sister to wait her turn (since it was MY birthday).  When all the squares were completed, I spotted a rather disgruntled couple in costume sitting on the sidelines.  The caller and the dance started up, and the other couples in our square, in professional regalia, started ushering and dragging my father and I around to the dance steps being announced.  Finally, I started putting all these clues together and realized, to my complete teenaged humiliation and embarrassment, that my father and I had just crashed a Square Dancing Performance!!  I had always thought of square dancing as a teach-as-you-go, anyone-can-play kind of thing.  It never occurred to me that the hotel guests were supposed to be simply spectators!  My sister was so happy that it wasn’t her birthday, allowing her to be spared this special treatment.  Ah well, Daddy.  It makes up for there not being enough room for us to dance together at my wedding reception in the parish hall of the church 6 years later.

So tonight, Steve & I are dancing.  I’m pre-posting this because I intend to get home from Old World Wisconsin all hot and tired and in need of a shower and sleep.  Enjoy your Friday night, friends!  I hope you DANCE!!!

P.S. Becca – you know this reminds me of you!

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I Love to Sing

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As I was washing the dishes in the kitchen sink, a song came back to me from years ago when my children were toddlers. I had just finished giving a voice lesson to a Baptist pastor at his storefront church.  He’s coming along nicely, despite a rather constant battle with sinusitis (with which I sympathize, having finally had surgery for chronic sinusitis about 10 years ago).  He’s got an entire electronic sound system set up in the sanctuary, which is also in the process of being remodeled.  They raised the roof a few feet, improving the acoustics tremendously.  Today, I asked my student to try practicing The National Anthem while using  a microphone.  I want him to really begin to like the sound of his voice.  That will give him more confidence and more motivation to practice and play around with what he’s got in his “bag of tricks”.  I told him that I get a similar opportunity when I’m at the 1839 St. Peter’s church at Old World Wisconsin.  At the end of the day, before I sweep up and close the windows, I allow myself some singing time.  By that hour, visitors are heading to the parking lot and rarely step inside.   I do the figure 8 processional up and down the aisles singing “Jubilate Deo” or “Dona Nobis Pacem” or “Amazing Grace”. 

The acoustics in this Gothic Revival building are fabulous!  I really like the way my voice sounds echoing up in those wide, white spaces.  Yesterday, I stopped in a corner and tried out Schubert’s “Ave Maria”.  I haven’t sung that since I performed it at a wedding four years ago.  It was a paid gig, just four months after Jim’s death, on our Kiss Anniversary.  I was nervous, I was emotional, but I got through it.  Then I cried all the way home in the car from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, to Illinois.  It’s a perfect song for St. Peter’s, the first Catholic cathedral in Milwaukee.  It sounds really lovely, but I need to find the music and remember the words! 

I am preparing to give another lesson this evening to my newest student.  She also has an amazing electronic set up…in her basement.  She’s a drummer; her husband plays and teaches guitar and writes songs for his rock ‘n’ roll band.  My student is going to try some Sarah McLachlan tunes.  She’ll do very well with that style.  So, I’m going to do a bit of listening now, but I’ll leave you with the song that started me off.  Enjoy!

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Hire Learning

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My head is bubbling with thoughts about education today.  I just started giving voice lessons to a new student…who is actually the Senior Pastor of a Baptist Church.  I like his attitude: he’s been singing with his worship choir for a while, and now, he wants to learn how, seriously.  He’s willing to pay to hear what another person has experienced and to try to have a similar experience himself.  That’s very humble, in a way, and very honoring.  There’s a mentality switch in allowing yourself to be taught.  It’s not like you can’t sing without voice lessons.  Heck, anyone can sing.  It’s not like you can’t cook without cooking lessons.  There have got to be hundreds of activities that we do without having ever had “instruction”.  What is added when you decide to be taught?  Standards? Judgment? Community? Collaboration? 

I’ve been having such a great time learning new skills at Old World Wisconsin and trying things I’ve never done before.  I’ve noticed some different attitudes among the people who have been instructing me, mostly about the extent of their ego involvement.  Some people teach from the platform of themselves — their experience, their methods and their knowledge seems to be the central point of engagement.  Others seem to be teaching from the platform of the subject.  They put that at the center and allow you to poke it and prod it in different ways, but they’re always looking for the results and responses from the material itself, as though they are still students themselves.   You can learn something from teachers of every style, I suppose, but I find the ones who loosen their ego grip more inspiring.  They allow passion for the subject to arise.  Therefore, I was pleased when my new student said that he found the lesson “really fun!”  He was discovering singing with his own voice, not mine. 

My daughter shared this great comic with me by e-mail, so I want to pass it on.  I hope it comes out legible!  (courtesy of xkcd.com)

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About Last Night…

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I skipped posting a blog entry yesterday.  We left town at 10:15 in the morning and drove to Chicago for a matinee at the Lyric Opera.  Then we went out to dinner with my newly legal daughter and didn’t return home until midnight.  That is my official factual excuse and reads kind of like the ones my mother used to write to my teachers in elementary school.  “Please excuse Priscilla’s absence from school yesterday.  She had stomach flu.”  The end.  Oh, but last night was wonderful.  I was aware of so much, and now I’m just not sure what to share, where to start, which story to begin.  If I had brought a camera with me, I might just present a series of abstracts and let you fill in the rest.  I didn’t bring a camera; I brought myself.  The data is in me, the images, the sensations, the concepts.  I am full and perhaps trying to stay that way.  If I leak a bit of the experience, will I lose it somehow?  If I try to distill the essence of the evening, will I vaporize much of what I so enjoyed?  Am I allowed to carry my life around like a secret?  Of course, I’m allowed.  The real question is, do I want to?  Why post and share and write and tell?  I sometimes hover between bursting like a pinata and hording like a dragon.  What do you do with the precious value of living?

Smile.  I’ll start with that.

Driving the Interstate with Steve, holding hands and laughing to Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcast “A Prairie Home Companion”.  Finding an alternate route on two-lane highways through the fields when we found the Interstate was closed in one section.  Settling in the upper balcony under a golden ceiling to listen to the virtuosity of a live performance of Baroque music.  Closing my eyes to the modern staging of Handel’s “Rinaldo” and imagining powdered wigs and candlelight.  Imagining what it would feel like to have those glorious high notes, trills, and runs burble out from my own mouth.  Watching my daughter talk about her life, noting her gestures, her warmth, her composure, marveling at her maturity.  Tasting truffle oil, mushrooms, garlic, Sangiovese, gnocchi, gelato – savoring and exclaiming pleasurably to one another in mid sentence.  Talking to the hostess about her Italian family, the recipes, the home country, the history.  Speaking words of love and support and appreciation to my daughter, noticing the shape of the space between us.  Riding home in the dark, so sleepy, so content.

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
― Thornton Wilder

photo from the restaurant's website

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The Cycle is Complete

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I have just returned from spending 6 hours at a modern multiplex movie theater.  Hate the glitz, the ads and especially the totally incongruous pre-show music.  I was there to see the HD simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and last installment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  If you’ve never learned anything about opera or Wagner before, I must encourage you to at least read up on it.  This was my first time getting the whole story and the whole score into my head.  I’d heard from my parents about how looooong the operas are.  I’d heard snatches of the music, even parodied by Elmer Fudd (“I shot the wabbit…”).  I’d heard about Wagnerian sopranos and sniggered at breastplates and horned helmets (hasn’t everyone?).   I was not expecting to be emotionally gripped and wrung out on an epic and divine scale, though.  The psychology is deeply moving.  The music supports it as cinematically and sumptuously as may be humanly possible.  The live action, singing and acting, is absolutely intense.  Seeing it with close up camera shots accentuates the intimacy, but it may take away from some of the total experience.  For this production, the set was designed by Robert Lepage of Cirque du Soliel.  It features a monstrous hydrolic machine which often distracts during the quieter instrumental passages as it whirrs and chunks into new positions.  Nevertheless, I was spellbound.  Particularly, I think, because I found myself identifying with Brünnhilde so painfully, on so many levels.   I’ve  been left sobbing at the ending of each of the four operas. 

Yes, I’m a bit of a drama queen.  I was a Voice Performance major in college and spent the last 7 years working for a theater company.  I can really get into live performances.  I put myself into the skin of the lead soprano every time.  But that’s just surface kinship.  Like Brünnhilde, my father was a god (in my eyes, at least, for a very long time), and I did everything I could to please him and do the right thing.  I ended up disappointed, my sister ended up banished, and the betrayal felt very real.  I left my father’s protection and fell in complete and holy love with a hero, a demi-god to many people.  He was duped and taken from me by a fatal disease.  I felt the anger, the confusion, the crushing grief and vowed to put the pieces together and learn the truth.  It took all my strength to face the facts, give up the ring of power, and stand for love.  I want to believe that in the end, greed, envy and the renunciation of love will sink down to the bottom of the river and that true friendship and faithful love will rise up.   So when our heroine mounts her trusty steed and rides into the funeral pyre with the ring on her finger and all of Valhalla (the gods’ palace) burns up and is engulfed in the flood of the Rhine and the ring finally returns to the river maidens, I experience an emotional catharsis that draws from a deep well of tears. 

Brava, Debra Voigt!!!

Drove home in below freezing temperatures, dove under the blankets in my bedroom and looked out the frosty window at this sunset:

It’s like Valhalla is still burning.  Will we ever learn?  At the end of the world, will love win?  The shamans of the Romantic era are telling us it’s possible.  Dare I believe?

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Art, Music & Myth: The Deeper Story of Being Human

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Are human beings the only animals that weep?

Charles Darwin noted that Indian elephants weep.  There have been many books written on the subject of animals’ emotions, and I haven’t read any of them, so I’m not going to venture an answer.  What I do know is that I weep.  And Steve weeps.   When we weep —  not cry, but weep — it seems to come from a sacred place in our soul, a place that has been stirred by something far greater than our selves.  Of course, we can make efforts to wall off that place, if we want to.  Bombarding ourselves with distractions often works to activate those shields.  We can also choose to be curious and try to understand that feeling better.

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” – Mark Rothko

Tears can be a sign of “religious experience”, then.  Fair enough.  Something spiritual is going on there.  What?

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.” – Mark Rothko

That loneliness, that “pocket of silence where we can root and grow” resonates deeply with my partner, Steve.  He calls it being moody or refers to his “Slavic melancholy”.  It’s not a sorrowful thing only; it is just as brightly tinted with joy, like some of Rothko’s paintings.  The combination, the totality is what hits home with him.  He says, “The deeper story is to face all of life.  Jesus and the Buddha are heroes of that story.”   They are not conquering wartime heroes interested solely in winning.  They do not struggle and strive.  They embrace all dimensions of life equally: the suffering, the love, the sacrifice, the elation.

Rothko - Untitled Red and Black

In the book The Power of Myth based on Billy Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell, I read:

Campbell:  “The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.”

Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans?”

Campbell: “It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.….”

Steve weeps when listening to Mahler.  And “Puff the Magic Dragon”.  Slipping into his cave, searching for that place to root and grow, he feels the poignant essence of life, the crescendo and decrescendo, and resists exerting his will against the flow.  I think that I have a different sensibility.  Maybe not so expansive, maybe more interior and visceral.  I identify with a lonely pocket of silence for rooting and growing…the womb.  I feel womb-love, the ache, the swoon, the exchange of life blood.  I see colors inside my eyelids, sunshine through membrane, the tragedy and ecstasy and doom of flesh.  Okay, I am in the grip of my biology this week, so this makes a lot of sense.  I have given birth four times and dream of my grown up children regularly.   The story that trips my tear ducts is “Homeward Bound”, anything with a reunion.  The deeper story for me has something to do with connection.  Maybe that’s the Gaia story.  I think she’s like Jesus and Buddha in that she also embraces all of life without struggling or striving, but in her own way.  Perhaps I feel more in my Sacral Chakra,  Steve in his Heart Chakra.

The deeper story of being human is told from inside this skin.  It is not the only story in the universe, however.  There is the elephant’s story, the asteroid’s story, more stories than we can imagine.  I would hope to know many more, and to weep at all of them.

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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.

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Zeal for Thy House

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We watched another installment of Simon Schama’s “Power of Art”; this one was on Van Gogh.  I didn’t know that he attempted a career as a missionary and was released for his “over-zealousness”.  That zeal, that fervor exploded in color and paint a few years later.  Perhaps the misfiring of his neurological circuits added to the visions he experienced, but that doesn’t make them any less real, does it?  For the film, an actor portrays him eating an entire tube of chrome yellow.  It is an intensely sensuous clip.  It makes me want to feel the passion myself, love and zeal and lust in an explosion of warm color and bright hope.  I wish I had art sliding around like finger paint beneath my skin.

Making chocolate truffles with my daughter; good gooey creativity

I feel the need to make something.  It’s going to end up being a pot of chili and some yeasty corn bread from scratch.  I wish I had some clay or acrylics lying around to play with, but I suppose it’s just as well I don’t.  I’d feel bad about wasting expensive materials just for the tactile exploration.  Still, I feel a tension within me longing for creative release.  Perhaps that’s because I haven’t been singing regularly for a while, or playing the piano.  I miss getting caught up in the joy of expression.  Do you suppose that our society suffers from creative repression on a massive scale?  With all the technology we have to take creativity out of our hands, are we fueling a psychotic collapse?  What if we staged a revolutionary return to physical creativity, set up mud pie and garden therapy stations, bread dough and needlework,  improvisational dance and percussion…would we see a decline in depression, suicide and domestic violence?

My fingertips get a mild work out typing every day, but it doesn’t feel like enough.  I used to do 8 hours of typing, telephoning, and staring at a screen in a cubicle every day.  It got very old.  I’m lucky to be done with that.  I hope that we don’t press people into that kind of thing more exclusively as our society “progresses”.  It seems pretty soul-killing.  I’d like to set them all free in a wheat field with a box of squishy colors and a canvas and let them stay out all day until the sun sets.  Then invite them to share a bottle of wine with me, some good crusty bread, and listen to them describe their experiences while they show me their work.  I want to hear their zeal and watch it float free into the world…with mine.