Parker Ramsay

For Dr. B.

Easter Sunday, 2017

Yesterday, a handful of children turned up at church to get in the Easter spirit a day early. As they painted hard boiled eggs and drew bunnies with crayons, the parish undercroft became a sea of pinks and light greens, spattered with yellows and the occasional blue. It’s always fun to see how children go to town with color, showing off their mastery of abstract expression, as the light flexible wax of crayons were blended: green hitting red to create an ugly brown for the Easter bunny’s tail, yellow and blue for turquoise eyes, red and white for his nose. While I was practicing upstairs in the church, colors were also changing. Good Friday’s shades of purple and black were retired for the festal Easter white, with hints of cream and light emerald in the bunches of lilies spread around the sanctuary (probably the largest number of lilies I’ve ever seen without the accompanying presence of a corpse and casket).

Having gotten through the weekend, there are other signs as well that Holy Week has ended.

(1) I’m exhausted.
(2) JOE Coffee is selling chocolate donuts with Peeps on top. (I had two.)
(3) Leftover Matzah is on offer at Fairway. So are Reese’s peanut butter Easter eggs.
(4) I started drinking lunch at 2pm.
(5) It’s now 5pm. I’m still lunching.
(6) Thus prompting me to blog.

For an organist, getting through Holy Week liturgies themselves isn’t really the hard part. It’s more the steps one goes through ahead of time that add up: picking hymns the congregation knows, distributing choir music, arranging for the musicians to show up at the right time in the right place, checking batteries in book-lights for services where overhead lights will not be available, checking the staging for the services, picking choir music that will not interfere with the requirements that the choir process around the church four times… oh yeah, and practicing. I’ve got to say, that it’s been relatively smooth sailing the last few weeks, and there have been points of fun with my boss as the topic of whether the choir music for Holy Week might be a tad NSFW has come up on several occasions.

On Good Friday, an eyebrow was raised when I instructed old my choir in a loud voice to begin from the verse starting “Fac me” in Palestrina’s Stabat Mater, by borderline yelling the word “Fac.” Twice. (Oops.)

On Monday, my boss overheard me asking one of my choir members if they had gotten the blow for Friday, to which he responded, “yes, and it’s FANTASTIC.” Luckily, it didn’t take long to explain that that we were talking about John Blow’s Salvator Mundi, and that I was not in fact using church resources to procure a Paschal eight ball.

That said, she was perhaps a little less convinced when the life and… well, proclivities of one composer came up this week. In a meeting a few days before Palm Sunday, I mentioned in passing that I thought the congregation would enjoy one particular piece set for Sunday’s service.

Boss: Oh great! I don’t think I know Gesualdo.

Me: Oh he was an Italian nobleman who was known for writing some pretty whacky music. He was a little crazypants.

Boss: (Laughter) Crazy? How?

Me: Oh well he killed his first wife.  

Boss: He murdered his wife?!? 

Me: And it’s rumored he killed his son too. One story goes that he had his son murdered in the court and had his own music played as he watched him die. 

Boss: (silence) 

Me: I mean it’s not totally verifiable. I mean he didn’t murder his second wife. But we do know was into some BDSM kink. Another rumor is that he died as a result of being whipped to death by his servants in a bondage set up.

Boss: (silence) 

Me: It’s really great! There’s even a Werner Herzog documentary on it and everything, including how his castle is still haunted and how the local townsfolk thought he was a cannibal. 

Boss: And you mean to tell me that the choir will be singing this man’s music on Palm Sunday… for holy worship.  

Me: Oh totally! Don’t worry, it’s a sacred work, all about the sex and violence thatone gets in the Passion story, you know with all the stuff about obedience and pain and whatnot.  

Boss: (silence, justified bewilderment) 

Me: I mean, it’s great for Sunday in a way. Like a late-Sunday-night-in-Chelsea-dungeon kind of Sunday way, if you get my drift.  

Boss: Uh huh. Well the church bulletins have already been printed, I guess I’ll keep an open mind.  

As kooky as the Gesualdo legends are, there’s a reason his music stands out and is appropriate for Holy Week. Indeed, choirs across the globe will be performing his O vos omnes, a setting of text taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: “All ye that pass by, look and see: is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?” Anyone who listens to is immediately struck that the music doesn’t sound as if it was written in the 17th century at all; it sounds as if it was written in the 20th, likened more to the music of Igor Stravinsky than any composer of the 17th century.  It’s not wholly unsurprising. The piece jumps around from key to key, playing with seemingly random and unrelated chords like a young piano student looking for the right notes to play. But what if I told you that we’ve been listening to this music the wrong way around? That Gesualdo doesn’t sound like Stravinsky, but that Stravinsky sounds like Gesualdo? That Gesualdo’s music doesn’t jump from key to key, and neither does some of Stravinsky’s? What if keys don’t have anything to do with it, because there are no keys?

Once again, I’m going to talk about one of my favorite professors at the Juilliard School, Dr. Kendall Briggs. In his class on the Baroque Concerto last Wednesday, he presented his students with Stravinsky’s Concerto in D. That’s right. This piece was not written in the Baroque era. It doesn’t sound Baroque (or so we think). It’s written for modern instruments. What the hell does it have to do with anything? Well, in taking the piece apart we learned Stravinsky organized the piece on Baroque tonal concepts whereby the “key” of D isn’t really a major or minor key of any kind, but is a sonic space which contains all the black notes you see on the keyboard but with a twist. In this scheme, black notes aren’t really “notes” but colorations or shadings on the white notes of the keyboard. F and F-sharp are really the same note, but shaded differently, just as pink and red are simply darker and lighter contrasts of the same pigmentation. BUT, what aren’t the same notes, are G-flat and F-Sharp – after all G is G and F is F, and one can’t simply make one the other.

Don’t believe me? Why do you think Isaac Newton came up with a scheme of seven colors for the refraction of light in the rainbow? Has anyone looked up after a rainstorm actually “seen” that mysterious indigo that supposedly lies somewhere between blue and violet? Don’t worry. Newton didn’t see that color either. He wanted to have seven colors to match the seven white notes on a keyboard, as he thought what a lot of people thought back then: that notes were colors for the ears.

That said, Gesualdo was known for throwing a bit more color on the canvas than others. I mean, one doesn’t hearken back to the music of his time and immediately think of harmonic iconoclasm or Messiaen-like synesthetic schemes. In the first three bars of his O vos omnes, he moves from C major to A major to F major chords in succession. They each have common tones, in the sense that C and A majors share both C (one sharp, on natural) and E, and F major and A are connected by A and C (one sharp, and one natural). The next cadence falls on a D major chord, connected to F major by sharing an A and an F (one natural and one sharp).

If we follow Newton’s color disc, we can see how Gesualdo’s colors start to blend naturally into one another, though they seem jarring at first hearing.

C major – C (Violet), E (Orange), G (Green)

A Major – A (Blue) C# (Magenta), E (Orange)

F Major – F (Yellow), A (Blue), C (Violet)

Content warning: nerd material ahead. 

I’m nerding out I know, but look at how C Major and A major are related. It’s not just that orange stays in place. It’s as if the red from the violet is extracted, and handed over to create the magenta, and that straight blue is left over. All the while, the red remains constant in the orange. But from A major to F major, the red is continually extracted, sucking it out of the orange to leave a simple yellow behind, while turning the magenta back into violet.

But there’s more to it even than that. There are always issues of tuning. What we think of as “in-tune” from a choir or a string quartet doesn’t always line up with the notes as their tuned on the piano. Often what we think is in tune actually adjusts the top two notes of a chord down. One can think of it like a bit like reclining in your chair at Passover, where the slight slump is comfortable, although it doesn’t make your spine look like the chart at your chiropractor’s office. What ends up happening is that the notes themselves become more flexible or more varied, though operating in the same color space allotted on the wheel. If we move E and G down in C, and C# and E down in A, the shades change, and the jarring harmonies we heard before are really just a palette of crayons exchanging reds, yellows and blues to create a little kaleidoscope.

Without a doubt, my colleagues who are well-versed in either art history and historical musicology are cringing at my gross oversimplification of the Gesualdo’s use of modal theory. But I suppose what I’m getting at is that getting lost in Gesualdo isn’t really about listening to it from start to finish in a “linear” or “horizontal” way, but in a more circular fashion – that is, incorporating the vertical and horizontal flexibly and simultaneously.

In his later life, Stravinsky set out on a quest to find a way to write chromatically without using new mathematical methods, such as those devised by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. In doing so, he acquainted himself with the work of Gesualdo, Heinrich Isaac and others to find out how it was that works from hundreds of year before could be so saturated with the crunchy harmonies and dissonances we associated with the early 20th century. In a 1952 interview with the New York Herald Tribune he posited that “After all, it is not easy to write tonal music. But I have found marvelous things long before the Baroque. Why is it do you suppose that we deny everything upon which the past upon which the present is built? This is what is wrong with most twelve-tone composers. They are indifferent to the vertical aspects of music. They are terribly deaf to the logic of vertical combination.” Stravinsky’s adoption of modal theory (made color theory by Newton), was the key to his assertion that harmony doesn’t simply function in straight lines, but is made up of the way notes relate to each other, rotate around a circle, create intervals. For him, there was no need for grids or matrices to find the natural manifestations of the harmony – it had already been figured out hundreds of years ago.

As abstract as a concept of “circular” music can appear, neither Gesualdo, Stravinsky nor Newton were alone in devising rotational schemes for the navigation of harmony. When asked what the essence of music was, Bach stated that “fa mi et mi fa est tota musica” (fa mi and mi fa are all of music).

My professor at Juilliard likes to draw rows of hexachords and show how the intersection of intervals line up across the ancient church modes, but Bach’s own name held a key to his understanding of harmony. Depending on how you spin the circle, one has the relationships of all semitones and rotational devices in a single tool, using the German note names B (B-flat) A, C and H (B-natural).

But even better is John Coltrane, and his conscious linking of music to Islamic concepts of the Divine ratios and even Einstein’s theory of relativity. Known for insane levels of virtuosity and spontaneity in his improvisations, Coltrane actually had a pretty tight organization scheme for all of his works, built around what has become known as the “Coltrane Circle.” Any musician will recognize the manner in which the circle of fifths are represented, but the incorporation of the Newtonian Circle at the same time offered a visually perfect representation of what he saw as a certain divinity in chromatic saturation. Whether you think it’s overrated or not, when Love Supreme was released in 1965, the world hadn’t really heard anything like it, being heralded as unparalleled in its abstraction and dissonance. But in transcribing the work and comparing it to Coltrane’s notes, the work is incredibly tightly organized around the a strict set of mathematical relationships, not unlike Gesualdo or Stravinsky.

At the end of the day, whether it’s Stravinsky, Gesualdo, Bach or Coltrane, the idea of the visuality of music, prompting you to look around, is central to any piece of music regardless of its funkiness or initial absurdity. Just as we can see colors around us and interpret how they relate to each other, we can listen to music in stereo, seeing how composers aren’t really using notes – they’re really just using a box of crayons.

I had the pleasure of interviewing harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani recently! Enjoy! 

https://van-us.atavist.com/insularities

On Wednesday night a companion and I headed out to Brooklyn, along with thirty or so millennials who drifted off Malcolm X Boulevard into a house party on Quincy Street in Bed Stuy. In some ways it was a standard Brooklyn hipster house, complete with an attention starved Labrador, some hanging plants and an ironic Buck’s head mounted on the far wall. Shoeless and bearded guests milled around discussing the rivalry between Apple and Google, drank wine from mason jars, and glanced thoughtfully at each other through their wide-rimmed glasses. Many of the guests did not know one another prior to their arrival, nor did they even know the host. Indeed, it was a peculiar event as this house full of strangers gathered with a common purpose: to hear an hour’s worth of music for the viol (viola da gamba) played by a viol consort.

The evening’s festivities were hosted by Sam Bodkin, founder and CEO of Groupmuse, a social network which connects classical musicians to homes in their respective communities to provide classical music concerts in a more “chill” setting than that of Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. Sat on the floor, the stairwell or on couches, audience members stared transfixed as they watched elegant bows on gut strings through the screens of their iPhones, Snapping and Instagramming for a social media boost. (Fear not, the crowd was assured that vegan string alternatives were available, even if they were not entirely historically appropriate.) Within five minutes, weed wafted like incense from the smoker’s lounge in the balcony overlooking the living room made stage, where several guests opted to and enjoy the birds eye view.

After the first piece ended, a member of the ensemble stood up to introduce the viol and its music, likening it to pop songs or musak (apparently Louis XIV liked listening to viols while on the loo). More mugs and iced tea glasses of wine were poured, and guests got to talk with the performers and ask them about their instruments, and in one case, even try it out. “I really feel like I’ve heard that last song somewhere,” noted one of the guests. While another ensemble member tried to talk about the specificities of harmonies and chord changes, another guest noted that one of the sadder numbers sounded like Nancy Sinatra’s My Baby Shot Me Down from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Shortly before evening’s end, the same ensemble member continued to talk to guests about the history of the instrument. “Really, the instrument is a living piece of history, with an itinerant past. We know that the earliest form of the instrument was brought to Spain by North African musicians, and spread across Italy and England with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain from the late 15th century onwards. Because of the instrument’s past in having travelled with migrants across Europe, it has a borderless and universal quality to it that means you can play any music from Italy, Spain, France, Germany or England from eras when national boundaries and identities were really beginning to harden. In a way, it’s an instrument without borders.”

While Classical music supposedly faces a crisis of relevance and popular consumption in the United States, there are cases where a few pieces make it off concert hall stages and into films, TV shows and the general public consciousness (Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, etc.). It’s probably a surprise to nobody that the popularity or recognizability of these works doesn’t necessarily derive from their construction, so much as their emotional utility. That’s not to demean these works – they are after all, staples of the canon. But their use and reuse render instantly recognized emotional connotations, such as ecstasy or sadness, or even just mere contemplation or detachment.

Sometimes there’s a downside, in that only fragments of these pieces get used – usually the beginnings of the pieces (so as to set the tone as fast as possible). It’s rare that you might even hear a full movement from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, even though it’s likely to be less than 2 minutes long. That said, there are notable exceptions. I found one a few weeks ago when I went to go and see Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea. Already worn down by a traumatic past and a series of ongoing family woes, the working class protagonist from coastal Massachusetts learns that his brother has died, he is now his nephew’s guardian and that he will have to return to former life in the town of Manchester by the Sea, a life he has been avoiding for years. To say that the characters in the film are laden with unimaginable grief is really only the beginning – there are also issues of addiction, unsteady employment, financial instability and a seeming stasis that arises as a result of personal tragedy and the seemingly inescapable circumstances which working class Americans face.

Most of the important points in Manchester’s tragedy unfold during a complete performance of Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio for Organ and Strings. The piece has all the elements of a morbidly sad work: the bass line moves downwards, note by note, not only giving that sense of feeling low, but being stuck. There have been two other composers in history who mastered the use of this idea, one being Beethoven the Moonlight Sonata, but the better one being Don Felder in Hotel California. But there are also moments of pause that feel more like moments of arrest than respite. The bass line stops, but as a result the violin takes off uncontrollably, losing any real sense of rhythm, spinning in its own grief. Overall, the film’s extended sequence is powerful, if totally depressing. But it drives home the plight of the film’s hero as intractable and profoundly distressing.

There’s been no shortage of outpouring of similar sentiments by my friends and colleagues over the last week. Despite the ecstasy of last Saturday’s marches, I’m probably not alone in feeling that we’re rapidly swirling the drain, rather than draining the swamp. Any instinct of empathy is being pushed to the limits, and more and more soul searching about why anyone voted for Trump goes on. Once Monday arrived and the executive orders started being signed, I went to bookstore at the Nashville Airport and picked up a copy of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s been heralded left, right and center, as the key to understanding “white backlash,” “white supremacy,” “rural America,” “Trump supporters,” on and on it goes. However, coming from a town of 2,000 people in rural Tennessee, the lessons that many of us have taken away from Vance’s book and depictions of life in Manchester by the Sea not only feel hollow but truly misplaced.

OK, confession time: I suppose I’m naturally distrusting of Vance because of his regular contributions to National Review, which often state the necessity for Americans to boot themselves up rather than look towards any institutionalized or systemic problems of inequality. Unsurprisingly, views such as these are regularly put forward in his book by turning the tired, age-old “welfare queen” narrative into one about the “white working class,” turning every experience of grief and hardship in life into an explanation of why rural America is the way it is. “Toxic masculinity,” “inability to save money,” and “emotional religion” are supposedly cultural traits that just are, and should be understood. He makes it clear that there’s no way for the government to help, and that any help would just be squandered by these poor folks anyway. People will drop out of school anyway. People will take drugs anyway.

Everything in his book comes down to issues of “self-inflicted poverty” and economic anxiety. Poverty makes you lazy, makes you simple, makes you ignorant, and nobody but you can get yourself out of it. What I find distressing is that my good Democrat friends have increasingly fallen for the narrative in the book on the basis that (a) the man who wrote it came from poor rural America and (b) he went to an Ivy League, so he must be educated enough to be appropriately circumspect.

Bullshit.

We know that our welfare system is far too limited at this point to really aid in a true escape from poverty. Decreasing people’s welfare doesn’t decrease the price of goods and the proportion of money people spend to make themselves comfortable. (Of course, when a poor person spends beyond their means, they’re white trash, but when middle American accumulates debt, he’s (yes he) been “duped” by the system.) We know other things as well: we know that counties that Bernie won in the Democratic primary went to Trump. We know we need better schools. We know we need more schools. We know we need more rehab facilities. Most of all, we also know that there are millions of non-white poor around the United States, who didn’t vote for Trump and didn’t even think about it, who don’t do drugs, beat their wives and squander the goodwill of an elected government. On and on and on it goes – we have plenty of evidence that the nexus of poverty and culture in America is way more complex than we’ve made it out to be. So why have we fallen prey to the idea that self-made individual prosperity is key to getting white Americans back into the fold of the Democratic Party? Why abandon the idea that the government can work with these people? Surely, if we believe Vance, then we are no better than our accusers that we think many of Trump’s supporters deserve poverty. Nobody deserves poverty, and if your anger is turning you against the Trump voters and rather than the GOP and the mega-rich who voted for him and aided his rise, then we’ve lost the game, not just the election.

Albinoni’s Adagio was borne out a period immense tragedy. Some years after the bombing of Dresden by the RAF, a small fragment of a bass line of Albinoni was supppsedly discovered by his biographer Remo Giazotto. At the time, it seemed an apparent phoenix rising from Dresden’s ashes. The problem is that this bass line fragment has never actually been seen. No record of the full original document which was in the Saxon State Library has ever been found. The bass line has never existed, but was a total fabrication of Giazotto, who copyrighted the piece in 1958 and presumably collected a significant amount in royalties. That’s right. It’s a hoax.

The Adagio is beautiful yes, but its fame and overuse come from its falsely contrived narrative that out of complete destruction and despair, that something beautiful can remain, as if there’s something cyclical about beauty and tragedy over time. For me, it’s another lie that we can fall prey to all to easily, but one that perhaps was appropriate for the film Manchester by the Sea. Again, the film is beautiful, but I wonder if it had been released in a different time and place, whether it would have prompted such strong questions about whether poor white Americans are the stereotypes that the GOP would have us believe that they are. I also wonder if I would have thought the film so powerful and message so convincing if Giazotto’s hoax hadn’t been used in the film’s climactic sequence.

We’re screwed enough as it is. Don’t fall for hoaxes.

vision changes
significant weight gain
rash
yellowish eyes or skin
dark urine
black/gray stool (my personal favorite)
fever
wheezing
swollen face or lips

I can drink again. Having been placed on a three-month course of anti-fungal medication (sexy, right?), I was under orders to avoid both grape and grain, lest my liver fail, rendering any of the aforementioned side effects. (Note: the list is not exhaustive. A struggling liver can in fact take many guises. My decision to hazard a glass of white wine on December 23 made for an interesting set of services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as I had the sensation that someone was attempting to extract an SUV from of my upper intestinal tract, while a hippopotamus loitered on my right temple.)

Fortunately, I’ve now finished the medication round. New Year, new me (and new toenails?). I wouldn’t say I’ve been celebrating as such, but I have renewed appreciation for some of the more bizarre drinking haunts in the city.

Friday, 1AM – Sake with lawyer-friend M. On late nights in East Village, one can find a fantastic assortment of despondent and depressed looking Japanese expats from NYU drinking away their sorrows. Decibel has no formal decoration, but is completely covered in Japanese graffiti and kitschy posters, adding extra grunge to this underground Tarantino -esque rice wine and tempura hovel. Of course, the quality of décor is proportionally inverse to the prices, as well the level of tipping expected by the staff: opening a bottle of Sake – though, not always the one you ordered – costs in excess of $95 and merits a 35% tip. (Fear not, I wasn’t paying.)

Saturday, 10PM – Up in Harlem, my friend P and I headed to ROKC, a ramen bar where the beverage list is four times the length of the food menu. My Japanese barley vodka with lavender and elderflower was served to me in a light bulb, while my companion’s spicy jalapeño cocktail came in a nitrogen-frozen green bell pepper. Totally unnecessary. AND ALSO AMAZING. Although if you are peckish, you can get a truffle appetizer, consisting of 2 oz. of hard cow’s cheese drizzled in truffle honey, for only $20.

Sunday, 7pm – A quiet drink with my friend A at Burp Castle, a Trappist-themed Belgian beer bar, complete with faux-Flandrian murals of Jesus being served beer by baby naked angels and winged friars, and overweight monks encouraging townsfolk to support both the Church and booming sex trade in a Belgian village. But be careful… SSSSSSHHHHHH! Bartenders enforce a noise limit as to keep the establishment as quiet as possible (I told you it was Trappist-themed). Talk too loud, and you are subject to a reminder from the staff that Burp Castle is the only bar in the city where having a truly quiet drink is in fact possible. Being told to “shush” by the bartender is precious. But on a busier night, beanie-clad Warby Parker bros can be witnessed doing some vigilante shushing, keeping up the exclusive-chic atmosphere that every NYC bar wishes it had.

 Were I a truly committed alcoholic, I suppose I would actually care about what I was drinking. But I’ve completely succumbed to the New Yorker’s addiction to ambiance, rather than substance. Let’s be real: third-rate sake isn’t particularly nice, barley vodka with lavender tastes of L’Occitane gift basket, and Belgian beer can be obtained anywhere in the city and for less than $11 a pint. And yet it’s so fun anyway. Who cares?  These establishments aren’t intended for daily frequentation, as the self-conscious absurdity levels are really appropriate for the occasional visit – there’s a maniacal sincerity about the bizarre which makes it enjoyable for a short while, before becoming totally overwhelming.

I must say it’s been nice to unwind and imbibe in some of the city’s quirkier establishments. I’ve been practicing a little harder than usual lately, as I’ve got some naughty music on the docket at the moment. My recital this weekend includes come music of György Ligeti, whose project to untie himself both from past influences and any acknowledgement of any contemporary trends and styles (read: carefully cultivated mind-fuckery) wrought a corpus of seemingly tongue-in-cheek works, all sharing the common trait of phenomenal technical difficulty.

For instance, one work for organ called Volumina requires three assistants, patience in reading a score that looks like a piece of visual art, and a venue willing to let you perform the work in the first place. (Between the use of your elbows and palms on the instrument and the intentional straining of the instrument’s winding system, the work has a reputation not just for pushing organs to the limit, but in fact breaking them.) The piece starts with all stops drawn, and every note depressed but with the organ switched off – the first real thrill comes from hearing the bellows strain and try and fill the organ with wind as best it can.

Very likely to the audience’s relief, I will not be playing Volumina on Sunday. I will however be playing two of his études. They definitely fall into the “fun” category, as they intentionally subvert the organ’s traditional role as a patrician instrument, symbolically antiquated and conservative in stature. Harmonies is the title of the first etude. While there are chords all throughout the piece, one can hardly tell: Ligeti intentionally has a single stop drawn out only halfway so that the wind can’t make it through all the way through the pipes. Clusters of dissonant chords are held down by the performer, changing one note at a time for 8 minutes, so as to show the textural potential of pipes themselves when they aren’t fully engaged. The effect is interesting, it’s somewhere between the quietly ecstatic and the faintly annoying, as if your prissy handheld vacuum cleaner is slowly running out of batteries.

Coulée, the second étude, works on a similar principle of changing harmonies one note at a time, but moves at a faster pace. The two hands begin playing the same material in mirror of each other, until gradually, note by note, they come apart playing irregular patterns in contrary motion to one another. On one level, it doesn’t sound too difficult, as it’s simply an exercise in bleeding notes in and out of each other. But the organ is clumsy and imperfect, and the chaos of the work requires a great attention to smoothness and ease. There’s no sustaining pedal like on a piano, no possibilities for pitch bending like on a string instrument.

In addition, I’ve got another piece by a friend in Germany which I’ll be giving the American premiere this week. This is going to be really fun. Rather than exposing the instruments’ capacity to be stretched, it’s a work which takes its grandiose and authoritarian visage and plays with it. Wendeltreppe is not just for organ alone, but for organ and pre-recoded electronics,  taking a very slow and dramatic section of Bach’s Fantasia in G minor and repeats it over and over. The original material is very weighty because of the number of key changes, unsettlingly changing sharps and flats to come full circle through all twelve white and black notes in 4 measures of music. But in my friend Jan’s piece, this section is repeated over and over, playing back and forth between the two instruments. But while my part remains mostly the same, the other part gradually increased both in velocity and pitch, constantly wavering in and out of being “in-tune” with the organ. The effect is hard to describe, except that the gradual effect is that one part increasingly sounds like a VCR on fast-forward, while the organist is struggling to keep up. By the end, the organ has to drop out as it can’t maintain the pace, while the electronics continue to unwind, getting faster and faster and faster…

Ok, you’ve got me. Portions of my program are intended to discombobulate, potentially discomfort and confuse the audience to the point that they have to – well, unwind. This isn’t to say that there isn’t “substance” to the music (although, I’m not quite sure what many musicians mean by that these days), but that purpose of the music isn’t so enveloping as to push you towards self-reflection, discovery of truth, any of the good stuff. Following the music, and tracking its progress isn’t the point. You’re not allowed to stand at five feet’s distance, but precisely the opposite: you’ve got to hop in for the ride.

Going to bizarre bars and establishments taking hip to n^th degree usually foot the bill just fine. But I’ve come to expect that from these placed. Sometimes it’s better to be surprised, to head to an exhibition or a concert expecting to be moved, and instead being overwhelmed by absurdity. Last week, Cate Blanchett did just that for me. At the Park Avenue Armory, Julia Rosefeldt’s Manifesto was on display, a video installation of 13 short films dramatizing the central tenets of major philosophical and aesthetic schools of thought. You had one on Marxism, Constructivism, Dadaism, etc. etc. I was curious to see what would be done with all of these. But in the first video, Cate Blanchett dressed up as a homeless Glaswegian man (complete with beard, beanie and trolley) amidst a disused industrial wasteland to recite Marx and Engels. Dadaism was an Irish-American widow, delivering a eulogy at her husband’s burial. You get the idea – it was cliché upon cliché, intentionally ironic about the messages.

But there was something else too. Each of twelve videos was exactly the same length and coordinated with each other. Every 15 minutes, in the middle of whatever video you were watching, I heard a single voice starting to sing on a monotone, coming from an American evening news reporter decrying her manifesto’s truth that all men are “fake.” But the lone prophet heralded a greater noise – 20 or so seconds later a D minor 7 chord whirs around the main hall of the Armory, as all of Cate Blanchett personae started to sing the central and most famous portions of their manifestos on monotones.

I admit I started to ask myself: what’s the point? Is it to show the beauty of the extent of human thought amidst the absurdity of delivery? Is it to highlight the sameness of all these Manifestos? Why a minor 7 chord? Is the dissonance indicative of the inability for men to resolve these questions? Or is it a symbol of perpetuity? But in each instance I was distracted by the puppeteer dressing her puppet as a hipster, the New York housewife lecturing her children, the Russian turban-wearing ballet choreographer, the West Coast yuppy artist, the maniacal stockbroker, etc. I couldn’t actually infer any meaning, because I was too busy simply looking and listening to it all.

I love going to things like this; Rosefeldt’s exhibit flies in the face of a far too common misconception that the avant-garde, the weird, the strange, the “out-there” – whatever you want to call it, is indigestible. But it’s only that way if we make it so. I’m known for being rather vocal about the fact that too many classical musicians and their ardent fans often take metaphorical pills to eliminate the possibility that the absurd, the ridiculous (i.e. fun, maybe) cannot be processed. We expect that music is supposed to “do” x, y z – move us, incite us to reflect, lead us our higher selves. After all, classical music is serious, remember? But humans need down time, and weirder music can, like alcohol, be taken in moderation. Obviously a solid diet of Ligeti might saturate the musical liver too far in the opposite direction. But what if we as musicians kept trying to program not just in terms of appeal, but with the view that avant-garde music, new music and variety are all necessary? The canon is so exhaustive, that we can surely take a break, ditch the pills, and grab a drink. Humans have to unwind. Shouldn’t music?

There are a host of terrible chichi French bakeries in NYC, prissily decorated and with no inkling that cholesterol is in fact a virtue. But as with many eating establishments in the city, the smallest and least known is the best. My local French patisserie is a hole-in-the-wall on 70^th street, a regular stop for my choir every Sunday en route to rehearsal. Though buttery croissants and pains au chocolat constitute my normal purchase, today was different. It’s Epiphany, which means only one thing: galette des rois.

Being neither French nor a fluent Francophone, my attachment to this fatty flaky almond surprise is derived only from my obsession with marzipan (no, really, it’s a problem) and out of nostalgia for a trip I made to France in 2011. Early that year, I went and visited my snobby Parisian friend N, a resident of a small village outside Saint Germain-En-Laye. She’s Franco-American in all senses of the term, simultaneously liberal as a Bay Area hippie, but with a penchant for cheese, champagne and foie gras (which she has been known to eat straight up with a spoon) that would be at odds with mainstream radical politics.

Anything with N is always a hoot, and this trip to visit her and her family was no different. On the afternoon of January 6th, having spent the day buying perfume on the Champs- Élysées, drinking tea at the George V and puttering around the Louvre, our trip to Saint-Germain-En-Laye required a detour. We spent a good 30 minutes wandering through the shopping center at Gare de Lyon, in search of an inexplicable pastry or cake which had to be bought and consumed that night. If one was not found, I was informed that the dinner planned by N’s mother would be ruined and Epiphany would not actually take place. We had to find a freaking “galeckhdehyrwah” (whatever the the hell that was).

Thankfully one was procured, and we proceeded to get on the train to the suburbs and get to her house. It took a while – apparently there was a train strike in Paris (I just love France). After an hour or so, we get home. Stepping into the centuries old structure in a historic village, I felt like I had stepped into a scene from Les Choristes or some other gray film set in post-war France. N’s house isn’t great – it’s incredible. Dinner was exquisite, and all were very grateful to have the cake. And yet, the evening still apparently went amiss. Following the salad and beef course, the cheese was served. No sooner I had taken my first bite, N started yelling furiously in French, wearing the face of someone who had just eaten dog excrement. Disaster had struck. The cheese was pasteurized (heresy, apparently). Her further dismay was expressed through the exhalation of cheese breath near her mother’s face to prove that the cheese did not smell bad enough to be “real” cheese.

N’s mother quickly took the cheese plate off the table and served the much-awaited cake. A Burger King-esque gold paper crown was also brought out, and I was informed that there would be a coin or baby somewhere inside the cake, not dissimilar to the king cake eaten in New Orleans on Mardi Gras (in fact the traditions are closely linked). If you got the baby, you got the crown (N got the baby obviously). I soon learned that the galette des rois was eaten in honor Epiphany to celebrate the Three Kings’ visitation to the manger. I was also informed that the story was basically irrelevant and that religion was “the opium of the people.” People just eat the cake these days because it’s yummy. Duh.

True to my Southern roots, I veered the dinner conversation away from Maoism and religion and asked about the history of the house. Indeed, it was very old, so old in fact that there was a Prussian soldier buried in one of the walls, killed by a group of heroic villagers in revolt during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. They said they had found this out when they heard some mysterious noises around their kitchen that could neither be expelled nor explained by their preferred South Indian witch doctor. Later, when they had their walls inspected and discovered the existence of the hidden cadaver, they concluded that the musket-wielding Kraut buried in the wall must be the source of their ghostly disturbance. I got a second slice of cake.

N’s parents soon reminisced about their days as undergrads at UC Berkeley, their various vacations around the world, and the cultural paradox of their lives as Franco-Americans. They talked about N’s brothers working in the United States and middle East, and N talked about her studies at King’s. It was extraordinary in a way; that night, French culture seemingly met a zany West Coast attitude about all things spiritual and philosophical. Mao and shamanism and pastry and cheese and history all converged at once at the dinner table, where sat a family at once at home in their lives and seemingly in a constant existence of expatriation wherever they were, being true citizens of the world.

As I finished my second slice of cake, I had a new appreciation for what home can mean when one has feet planted in different parts of the world. For me, Advent is a time when I head to Hudson Street to buy English mince pies, and Dim Sum in Queens is a must around Christmastime. But nothing reminds me so much of what it means to have lived in such vastly different places (Tennessee, Ohio, England, NYC) than in consuming a slice of galette des rois. I don’t really remember places as such, but I remember the people, particularly the fellow wanderers through life who bounce around and won’t sit still. N is one of those people, who I still see every so often and talk about how home isn’t geographical in the least. It’s about something else.

For instance, every time N visits, she comes and watches the rehearsal services go by on 69^th street, reminded of the evensongs at King’s she would attend up to three or four times a week. Unsurprisingly, her favorite pieces are French. However, she always tells me how the music of Poulenc doesn’t remind her of France at all, but the sensation of being at home in Cambridge even for just a few minutes, hearing music sung and played by her friends in her native tongue.

I guess “home” in this sense really comes down to sensations of comfort, seemingly easy for some, fleeting for others. N, like me, is constantly on the move, living in her fourth city in 5 years. I’m grateful that she’s not too far from me on the East Coast now. She came up last week for New Year’s, and got Dim Sum with me in Queens, a newer tradition of mine that I was excited to share. We also hit MUJI, Stumptown, the NYPL, and then partied in Williamsburg until midnight. On January 1, she came to church and departed again for DC, and as usual I miss her. But every year, come January 6^th, it feels like she’s across the table as I stuff my face full with pastry and marzipan.

As usual, I’m behind on some stuff at work. Since Christmas and the New Year both fall on Sundays this year, the much-needed break to catch up on life has been noticeably absent. Instead of a real breather, I’m sitting in my mother’s study here in Tennessee, cat in lap and coffee in hand, as the plans for next semester’s music at church are set into motion.

I imagine that a few Episcopal musicians around the country are doing much the same (give or take the cat), looking at lectionaries and readings to come up with appropriate hymn and anthem choices. The liturgical side of it is easy, right? I mean, the Church has had a good 2000 years to come up with some appropriate tunes for your SATB choir and electro-pneumatic box of whistles.

Wrong. What can my choir sing? What will my congregation tolerate? (What will my priest tolerate?) What length do the pieces realistically need to be? Is there enough rehearsal time? Can I be bothered? What if I tried something new? (N.B. Episcopalians don’t really “do” change) On and on it goes, the constant balancing act of providing tasteful and meaningful art that fosters contemplation and openness and complements the liturgy that you have to work with.

Ok, ok so I sound like I’m whining. The truth is that is actually part of the fun of the job. Exploration, looking for music, maybe finding something new and unexpected, or possibly resurrecting old chestnuts – it’s a scavenger hunt of sorts. More often than not, I’m in the business of finding new things for the choir. It’s a paid octet, four ladies and four gents, capable of singing a myriad of styles comfortably. But it’s only eight voices and it’s a small room. Victorian and Edwardian warhorses tend to sound prissy if lacking enough voices. Saccharine acapella counterpoint from the 16^th century requires a big room for all the harmonies to float around and wash your brains with counter-reformation era piety. The unique challenge is therefore finding music for intimate forces to be performed in an intimate space – chamber music for voices, if you will.

Increasingly, I’ve found myself abandoning my Oxbridge chapel training and thinking about the various seminars and classes I had at Oberlin on music for the domestic sphere. These days, “Great “Western Music makes many of us think concert auditoriums, recital halls and large churches (especially with liturgical music). But as most musicians will tell you, before the era of TV or widely accessible public entertainment, much of the core of Western Music was written to be played in homes… or sung in homes.

Going back to the 16^th century, in the days when the sacred and the profane were blurred, music was used not just as entertainment but also as a form of devotion. Being co-owner of the first music-publishing house in Europe, William Byrd was a major proponent of domestic musicianship.

 Byrd was a good businessman. In 1575, he and Tallis had tried publishing a large set of church anthems in Latin, but the venture had virtually flopped. By 1588, however Byrd had picked up on where commercial viability of newly printed music would be: the Madrigal and the consort song. Nodding to the popularity of mouthy secular tunes, and their flexibility in performance, Byrd put together collections of English songs and sonnets which were totally flexible with regards to performing forces, and even bridging the gap between the sacred and profane. Printed in part-books, families could gather round a table with their voices and instruments, and could choose to sing or play any of the voices accompanying the main melody line. Multiple verses were included as to allow for people to pass the solos around or mix it up, and reprises were often included so that people could put down their instruments and all join in and sing at the same time. It’s beautiful music, yes, but it’s all the makings of a DIY jam session for amateur musicians.

This music is of course less likely to be performed in one’s home today. I know almost nobody with a full set of viols, a lute and a penchant for Elizabethan English who would sit around their houses, bonnet clad, to pray on a Tuesday afternoon. If I did, I would doubt they would have a family or indeed a sufficient number of amicable acquaintances with whom to make such music come off the page. That said, it’ll do just fine for my church choir. All the voices are easily reducible into a keyboard part (which they often did back in the day) and is low maintenance on the rehearsal front. While the Elizabethan amateurs were quite skilled, the level of complexity in the music isn’t sufficiently high to compete with the likes of Herbert Howells or Francis Poulenc – it’s intentionally uncomplicated.

There are problems: in the original editions, words and music were published separately… lining them up is a matter for interpretation (ahem, by me. not my choir). Also the musicians of yore used a slightly different notation system. And the font in the words looks funny. And the spelling situation is a tad iffy. So yes, instead of thinking about hymns or psalms or the normal boring stuff, I’ve been creating some editions for my choir to sing. It’s a lot of effort, yes, but the devotional poetry from that era touches a level of personal emotion that few religious poets have matched since.

Why do I use my paper, ink and pen,
And call my wits to counsel what to say?
Such memories were made for mortal men;
I speak of Saints whose names cannot decay.
An Angel’s trump were fitter for to sound
Their glorious death if such on earth were found. 

Though not quite Shakespeare or Marlow, granted, there’s a personal touch that brings sacred parlance down from the loftiness and severity of something like scripture. There are angels trumpets and saints, but also everyday writing utensils and even colloquialisms like “wits” to label one’s common sense. There’s also a strange sense of defiance of scripture itself – paper and pen are for human memory, but that which lasts is what is spoken, word of mouth, person to person.

But another one of Byrd’s consort songs pops up on my iTunes list this time of year. Again, growing up in a house of musicians with an early-music-nerd mother, December’s soundtrack always included some of the early recordings made by Joel Cohen and the Boston Camerata. On the recording Sing We Noel, music from England and Early America is interspersed and combined to showcase New England’s musical progeny with some historical context. Indeed for me, the Christmas hasn’t really begun until I’ve heard The Midnight Cry or other early American hymns on the CD. But woven amongst the folk songs, carols and country-dances is a little lullaby by Byrd.

My sweet little darling, my comfort and joy,
Sing lullaby lully.
In beauty surpassing the Princes of Troy.
Sing lullaby lully.
Now hush, child, now sleep, child, thy mother’s sweet boy.
Sing lullaby lully.
The gods bless and keep thee from cruel annoy.
Sing lullaby lully.
Sweet baby, lullaby, lully.

I admit I hadn’t ever seen the music or text to this sweet, sweet piece until I was searching for music for my choir this week. I was pleasantly surprised to find it, but in looking at it realized I had misheard the lyrics for a while: I’d always heard the line “in beauty surpassing the Princess of Troy,” as what I assumed was a reference to the mighty Helen. Yet in all the editions I could find this week, they read “Princes of Troy.” As I read, more things occurred to me – yes, it’s a lullaby, but not sung by Mary, perhaps; “thy mother’s sweet boy” renders a strange ambiguity. “The gods bless thee and keep thee from cruel annoy” also seems odd – there’s being awoken from sleep, but what about the situation inspires cruelty or avarice?

Indeed, the lullaby isn’t really about Helen at all, but about the Trojan prince Ganymede. Most musicians know him because of Schubert, whose short song begins in one key and ends in another, taking little Dorothy from Kansas to Oz in just 4 minutes or so. It’s also one of the only examples of an open reference to male desire, prompting a myriad of questions as to Schubert’s “allegiances,” if you will.

He was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves, to be Zeus’ wine-pourer, for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.

(Homer, Iliad XX)

And when his feeling continues and he is nearer to him and embraces him, in gymnastic exercises and at other times of meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Himeros (Desire), overflows upon the lover, and some enters into his soul, and some when he is filled flows out again.

(Plato, Phaedrus CCLV)

While such a reference may not be uncommon in visual art, the protestant inclination to separate the body from the soul has sort of sanitized the long held associations between beauty and divinity, the vulnerability of the soul and the body. There’s no beating around the bush here – Ganymede was taken by Zeus and made immortal because of his looks, history’s first “yes-boy” the Olympian harem, whose carnal self-sacrifice was not that mortification, but copulation.

Is Love a boy? What means he then to strike?
Or is he blind? Why will he be a guide?
Is he a man? Why doth he hurt his like?
Is he a God? Why doth he men deride?
No one of these, but one compact of all,
A wilful boy, a man still dealing blows,
Of purpose blind, to lead men to their thrall,
A God that rules unruly, God he knows.

Boy, pity me that am a child again,
Blind be no more, my guide to make me stray,
Man, use thy might to force away my pain,
God, do me good, and lead me to my way:
And if thou be’st a power to me unknown,
Power of my life, let here thy grace be shown.

(William Byrd)

Indeed, by contemporary standards, Byrd’s little lullaby is comparatively tame in the references to explicit male desire, and even the equation between Christ and Ganymede.

Take a look at some Thomas Traherne,

O NECTAR! O delicious stream!
     O ravishing and only pleasure! Where 
     Shall such another theme       
Inspire my tongue with joys or please mine ear!      
     Abridgement of delights!              
       And Queen of sights!          
O mine of rarities! O Kingdom wide!        
O more! O cause of all! O glorious Bride! 
O God! O Bride of God! O King!           
O soul and crown of everything!        
   Did not I covet to behold         
Some endless monarch, that did always live
   In palaces of gold,      
Willing all kingdoms, realms, and crowns to give    
   Unto my soul! Whose love              
     A spring might prove
Of endless glories, honours, friendships, pleasures, 
Joys, praises, beauties and celestial treasures!        
Lo, now I see there’s such a King,          
The fountain-head of everything!      
   Did my ambition ever dream     
Of such a Lord, of such a love! Did I        
   Expect so sweet a stream         
As this at any time! Could any eye
   Believe it! Why all power             
     Is used here;
Joys down from Heaven on my head do shower,       
And Jove beyond the fiction doth appear     
Once more in golden rain to come           
To Danae’s pleasing fruitful womb.               
   His Ganymede! His life! His joy!          
Or He comes down to me, or takes me up   
   That I might be His boy,          
And fill, and taste, and give, and drink the cup,      
   But those (tho’ great) are all           
     Too short and small,
Too weak and feeble pictures to express     
The true mysterious depths of Blessedness. 
I am His image, and His friend,  
His son, bride, glory, temple, end.

(Love, 1614)

John Donne also,

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

(Holy Sonnet 14)

The deeper you dig, the steamier it all gets. But too often modern gender binaries can cause us look away from sentiments such as these: the human form and all its desires are encompassed in the divine relationships between a redeemer and one redeemed.

The secret sins that hidden lye within my pensive heart.
Procures great heaps of bitter thoughts and fills my soul with smart;
And yet the more my soul doth seek some sweet relief to find,
the more doth sin, with vain delights,
Alas, still keep me blind.

Thou see’st, O God, the strifes there are between my soul ans sin:
Thy grace doth work, but sin prevails and blinds my soul therein.
Wherefore, sweet Christ, thy grace increase, my faith augment withal,
And for Thy tender mercy’s sake,
Lord, hear me when I call.

(Orlando Gibbons)

I guess for me the other reason that I love delving into the poetry and music of the Elizabethan era is that it’s in some ways pretty relatable. I’m sure someone can lambast me with criticisms that this is not “gay” poetry, that “gay” did not exist, etc. I’m not arguing God was gay (though Byrd and Tallis probably were), but that metaphors of same sex desire are a pretty cool part of both the Church’s and Westen culture’s history. Where it factors in for me is on Sunday morning: a key element of an inclusive theology in the Episcopal Church is not merely acceptance or inclusion, but perhaps a recognition that the manner in which LGBT persons relate to each other and to their own bodies has always been on the table. Christ’s humanity as an object of physical desire makes us really uncomfortable; I know that I see this poetry, and it feels like a line has been crossed, like Lady Gaga riding on a motorcycle and having a threesome with Christ and Judas. Again, my own religious beliefs are complicated and probably don’t fall within any recognizable orthodox Christian canon (OK, I’m basically agnostic), but if Christians truly believe that humans are made in God’s image, it seems the imagery of God perhaps needs updating.

If in thine heart thou nourish will
and give all to thy lust,
then sorrows sharp and griefs at length
endure of force thou must.

But if that reason rule thy will
and govern all thy mind
a blessed life then shalt thou lead,
a fewest dangers find.

(William Byrd)

As any choral scholar or church musician will tell you, the interpolation of the profane or subaltern in evensongs and Eucharists is always a point for raising eyebrows, glances across choir stalls and smirks in rehearsals. There are tons and tons and tons of euphemistic references to secretions, orifices, penetrations, and everything in between. It’s funny because we force ourselves to assume these are just coincidences, even though when compared next to the really passionate contemporaneous poetry, the references are not euphemistic at all – they’re pretty damned explicit. Without sounding too overtly political and gay-rightsy, it’s also a tad affirmative, as Episcopal and Anglican musicians have their fair share of sexual minorities (and then some) among their ranks. For me, returning to Elizabethan poetry and music is a means of exploring and discovering some of the ways in which the imagery of the divine was not separate from the human experiences of desire and love.

Yet in spite of envy, this be still proclaimed,
That none worthier then thyself thy worth hath blamed:
When their poor names are lost thou shalt live famed,

When thy story long time hence shall be perused,
Let the blemish of thy rule thus be excused,
None ever lived more just, none more abused.

(Thomas Campion)

There are images upon images of Christ’s divinity – Constantine the Great saw Christ as Apollo, Monteverdi, as Orpheus. But in his little lullaby, Byrd chose Ganymede, no coincidental reference, but perhaps one of the most recognizable and meaningful metaphors for the awe of a physical incarnation in human form. There is no doubt that it’s complicated – the associations with Greek pederasty are more than problematic. Such problems face the gay world today, as a new film about Tom of Finland (http://tomthemovie.com/) presents problems of the roots of gay imagery in the 20^th century in the dress and masculinities of the SS in World War II (yup, your chic gay friends really do have Nazi haircuts).

I thought that love had beene a boy, with blinded eies,
or else some other wanton toy, that men devise,
like tales of fayries often told,
by doting age that dies for cold.

(William Byrd)

Religion is certainly imperfect, but I suppose the Episcopal Church gets it right in celebrating the inconsistent and incongruous rather than sanitizing it. But I would challenge my fellow church musicians to take the time to use the music to explore and push the boundaries of how divinity is presented and displayed in music, not just for the sake of inclusion or a project in political correctness, but perhaps to simply recognize and celebrate the myriad of ways in which the human manifestation of God really did focus on the “human” part, and not just the “holy” part. While Zeus and Ganymede feel as if they push some  limits, the poetry and references only risqué is you allow them to be. What if church music and the texts we choose were not only upheld the orthodox but incorporated the heterodox? Painters and poets do not have the position in churches that musicians do in choosing art week in and week out for people to relate to, be it with imagery of biblical stories, of nature, of femininity, of family. Why should sexuality be off the table? After all, one of the key tenets of any working relationship between faith and sexuality is “No shame, no blame. ”

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                             Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                            Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                            So I did sit and eat.

(Love, George Herbert)

I don’t mean to be a Scrooge, but it’s December 23 in NYC.

OMFG.

Christmastime in Manhattan is always a bit of a scene, but the combination of yuletide consumerism and an absurdly bourgeois friend group can raise the experience of gift shopping from the intolerable to the downright ridiculous. I suppose I only have myself to blame – I willingly met up with three opera singers in SoHo to accompany them as they shopped.

11.30 AM – First stop made at the magnificent Crate and Barrel, on the corner of Houston and Broadway. Baritone and organist take to sitting on couch while soprano waits twenty minutes for an artisanal bar spoon cum muddler. No, this could not be purchased at William Sonoma or any of the other fantastic culinary dens of tchotchke iniquity in the soprano’s native Brooklyn.

12.15PM – Lunch! But where? Everything in SoHo is infuriatingly chic. Tenor and Soprano break down and agree to eating lunch at a mac’n’cheese bar (…yup…) off Lafayette (called, very originally, Mac). Soprano gets hers with mushrooms – The tenor, with fontina cheese. Organist, true to form, orders one with ground beef and sriracha – essentially a glorified hipster Hamburger Helper. Accompanied, of course, by an organic ginger beer. $17 please.

1PM – It apparently takes 20 minutes to make mac’n’cheese at an all-mac’n’cheese gourmet fast food restaurant. Lacking access to nicotine, caffeine is the next best bet for recovery. Coffee is obtained at La Colombe, another disgustingly small SoHo establishment, being made even smaller by the abundance of shopping bags from Hollister (ew), Armani and Louis Vuitton, as well as a pair of dilated pupils belonging to a barista who seems to be having a very merry Christmas indeed. (Likewise, this takes 20 minutes.)

3PM – Brooklyn (thankfully?). Musical quartet and soprano’s brother (hereafter known as Bro), wander down Smith Street in Boerum Hill to a cheese shop called Stinky. Living up to its name, the shop smells of alcohol, liver and ammonium lactate (yum). Yet the cheese shop sells a number of items, which to the untrained eye or palate could be mistaken for items sold at your local spa. The most conspicuous culprit is a box of crackers made from charcoal (huh?) with a mistranslated label on the back in German which read “Arsche Cracker” (ass crackers) instead of “Asche Cracker” (“Ash” or charcoal crackers).

Truffle Salt – Stinkify your mashed potatoes and braised kale, sure. But why stop there? Use leftovers to gently exfoliate, leaving your skin smelling fungal fresh. 

Duck fat with Orange, Rosemary and Lavender – Tired of all those ethical products made from palm trees and coconuts? Tired of smelling like your yoga instructor or last night’s pina colada? Try the sensual smoothness of herb-spiced duck fat, sure to make you popular with cats, dogs and that finance jock-brah in the cheese shop wearing running tights under his 4th of July Chubbies. (No, I couldn’t find him on Tinder.)

Aromatic bitters – Allow the natural powers of chicory, allspice, espresso and apple cider vinegar not only to enhance your cocktail, but everything in your life, from your colon to your countertop. Impress your friends, your family and even your proctologist  at your holiday parties as you show off your squeaky clean existence.

Fine English Charcoal Squares – while excellent with your D’Affinois or Humboldt Fog, Fine English Charcoal Squares use the power of pure charcoal to ignite a unique blandness and passive-
aggression, capable of pumicing the thick skin off even the most self-loathing middle-class WASP. Save yourself a trip to the local Korean spa and indulge in the latest breakthrough in home foot
care. Travelling abroad? Look for our items in Germany and Northern Europe! Just ask your local cheese den for a box of Fine English Arsche Crackers (Ass Crackers? ). “Fine English Goods – Somebody needs a cracker…”

3.30PM – Soprano, Bro, Tenor and Organist wander around Boerum Hill while lactose-intolerant Baritone has a lie down after sampling cheese at stinky not long after the 2016 Manhattan Mac’n’Cheese Massacre. Next stop is made at a shop called Elements, a spa selling massages, aromatherapy and reiki. Bro buys massage gift certificate for mom. Soprano and Tenor begin discussing opera coaches (or maybe Dante’s Purgatorio? Hard to tell the difference…) Organist gets back on Tinder.

4PM – A stop at Sahadi’s grocery, waiting in line for… 20 minutes to pick up containers of their world famous spicy hummus.

It was not long after this that I said by goodbyes, as we proceeded to search in several liquor stores for Chimay Grand Reserve Trappist ale. I admit, I was having fun, but the choir library beckoned, as did other preparations necessary for the coming Christmas Eve services. Returning to the city, I was internally going over the music in my head for the coming weekend. Harold Darke’s In the Bleak Midwinter, Once in Royal David’s City, Peter Warlock’s Bethlehem Down – some of the great chestnuts of the English Carol repertoire, made famous by the BBC’s worldwide broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge.

Christmas Eve on 69th street is thankfully more understated and less stressful than those I spent in Cambridge a few years ago. It’s still a great service, though. The world famous Paul Jacobs, our Artist-in-Residence, takes over the organ keys for the evening as I stand in front of the choir and sit behind a harp. Following our initial procession singing Once in Royal, the evening’s service begins with a performance Britten’s Ceremony of Carols for voices and harp, setting the tone for the rest of the service. It’s really a meditation/prelude which takes the traditional Lessons and Carols format and tips it upside down.

That morning, we organists and church nerds of the United States tune in and listen to the first lesson about the fall of Adam and original sin, preceding one more settings of Adam lay ibowndyn – a medieval Carol which retells the story in vernacular middle English.

Adam lay ibowndyn,
bowndyn in a bond,
Fowre thowsand wynter
thowt he not to long
And al was for an appill,
an appil that he tok.
As clerkes fyndyn wretyn
in here book.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
the appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
a ben hevene quen.
Blyssid be the tyme
that appil take was!
Therefore we mown syngyn
Deo gratias!

Britten does something really different with this carol though – he doesn’t stick it at the beginning of row of carols as usual, but sticks it at the end. It’s also not a solemn setting by any means – it’s punchy, rhythmic, and totally ecstatic by the end: the harpist goes ape, playing glissandos at will (equivalent to a pianist banging on all the white keys as fast as they can) while the choir sits on an A major triad.

It’s quite a statement to make, as the whole series of carols meditating on Mary’s relationship with her son, the frailty of children poverty, of death and implications – the big elements we all know when we envision the crèche – ends up saying that there’s no celebration without a prior travesty. In short, the human condition is not to be bewailed, but beheld or even embraced.

There are so many threads like this all throughout the Ceremony – for instance there are carols carol carols, but no lessons to accompany them. Each movement bears a direct tonal relationship with both the movements before and after. The Nativity becomes less of a linear story, and more of a prism through which view how human characters interact at the manger. A major to F major to D-flat major to F-sharp minor to D sharp major and E-flat minor – musicians will recognize what are called the “tertiary relationships” between the movements, whereby the key centers bear common tonal traits with one other but are yet distinct. Composers such as Schumann and Schubert used the same trick in their own song cycles to give an intangible sense of relationship between songs without having to rely on narrative. For Britten, it’s as the nativity – the birth, the “event,” our reflection – is a single psychological event, a retrospective on the beauty of the imperfections in one of humanity’s classic tales of humility.

In revisiting the score again for the eleventh Christmas in a row, the notes fall under my fingers and yet there is meaning anew. As with last year and the year before, pacing is up for grabs, as it’s sometimes not clear how to link movements together with no clear narrative. Which movements tie into one another? Which ones stand alone? Which strings need to keep vibrating? Do others need muffling or need to die away? What did I do last time? What should I do this time? Like Christmas itself, the Britten becomes one more of those elusive “life events” that we humans assign meaning to each time they come round. It’s never exactly the same, as familiarity it sufficient. We change our Christmas traditions slightly, our feelings differ year to year; we shop for new clothes, familiar foods with an updated taste, gifts for family to get them back to where they were a Christmas prior.

The Dickesnsian trope of time and its expenditure in A Christmas Carol is no accident – it’s perhaps just a more glaring reminder that Christmas concentrates our preoccupations with time, whether we like it or not. For instance, the perceived permanence of the gifts we give and receive is important but changeable every year – the millennial needs a KitchenAid (duh), something solid and forward-looking, but the parent needs a massage, a dessert, a bottle of something strong, or any other ephemeral goods which might challenge longevity’s recourse. In this sense, it really is a season to buy ridiculous gifts and to grant someone the same joy one gets in believing that all experiences are still fresh.

Yet despite the fun of the wild shopping goose chase today, I’m reminded that music’s tenuous ground between the permanent and the temporary offers something that gift-giving and receiving just doesn’t. Musicians are lucky enough  to reside in that fun little space of temporal and emotional mutability, taking the same barebones again and again, but making them at once new and while also nodding towards the past. For me the Britten is no different than most people’s favorite songs, hymns or Christmas carols. We remember them and time itself renders not just new meaning, but an accumulation of meanings. The title of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol  is also no accident – music constantly deals with the strangeness of time.

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed.  “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.  Oh Jacob Marley!  Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this.  I say it on my knees, old Jacob, on my knees!”  (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)

It’s ironic for me in a way, because while the service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College Cambridge is an important part of my morning every year (for more reasons than one) my memories with Britten stretch back further. From an old 8-track tape in the car to the CD recordings, from the performances my professional harpist mother gave, to my own performances for the last eleven years: the act of sitting at the harp, working with the score, putting my fingers to the strings – it’s still the absolute epitome of Christmas for me. Since I was born, be it from listening to watching, to singing, to playing etc. I’ve done something different and changed how I feel, but in relation to a single piece of music. Like Christmas it’s an event, but more stable and meaningful perhaps because I am after all a musician. Sitting on a piano stool at 69th street on Christmas Eve, I’m at once in my parent’s old Volvo, on stage at Blair School of Music, in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, the chapel at King’s, at my home church in Nashville, Tennessee – just as Scrooge found out, Christmas is all Christmases at once and none, stable in the knowledge that it will come next year, when you are once again, miraculously the same person with a new heart.

­

Halloween. The Upper West Side is seemingly flooded with Minions, race-car drivers, bandits, cowboys, and a meddle of Star Wars and Pixar characters. Mama Leia was spotted on 67th and Columbus pushing Yoda and Anakin in a double stroller, while Woody and Buzz Lightyear were running away from their exhausted candy sac-toting father. I confess I somewhat envy these children as my own Halloween costumes weren’t exactly exercises in autonomy, self-expression, or even good old-fashioned American commercialization. For instance, I remember revealing myself to my Kindergarten colleagues dressed up as an Argentinian Gaucho. Niche? Absolutely. Simply dressing up your son as a cowboy was a bit too pedestrian for my mother.

Third grade? I couldn’t go to the church Halloween party as Julius Caesar, but instead had to impersonate Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor. Apparently Caesar’s penchant for imperialism, incest and infanticide rendered him an inappropriate figure to appear at a Baptist Church function. Either way, logistics were an issue, as my bright purple toga prevented me from roller-skating around the church gymnasium like the other kids. Heaven forbid an emperor merely wheel around his subjects in a plebian tunic.

Fourth grade took the cake. I was placed in grandmother’s care (catastrophic error). While I was indeed granted my wish to dress up as the Phantom of the Opera (because this 9 year old was going through a Sarah Brightman phase in his young life), like most things with my grandmother, it came at a price. The mask and cape were purchased, but also a portable cassette player and a karaoke tape of “Music of the Night” to perform for members of my grandmother’s Sunday school class. Trick-or-treating consisted of being driven around the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky for three or four hours to sing for the accumulation of a grand total of ten pieces of Halloween candy. These ten pieces were then inspected at my grandparents’ kitchen table with a magnifying glass and checked for holes and punctures in case they were poisoned (my grandmother was a little neurotic). Only then was I was allowed to consume one a day, on the condition that I had brushed my teeth twice already on said day. Needless to say, that was the last time I dressed up for Halloween.

As kids we’re naturally unaware of the bigger picture surrounding Halloween, autumn, seasonal change. I didn’t think too hard about the cost of my costumes, whether I looked completely idiotic or offensive, and I certainly didn’t think about the calorie count of my candy. Meteorology wasn’t at the front of my mind either; the change in weather was just a chance to jump in a pile of leaves and eat pumpkin pie. As I got older, more and more I started thinking about the arrival of autumn, the nebulous idea of “change,” the doom of colder weather, putting on the winter weight, and impending reality that I’ll have to start practicing Christmas music before too long. As I pick up a ghost shaped chocolate or grab a slice of pumpkin bread from the coffee shop, the taste doesn’t remind me of costumes or trick-or-treating. Most days, it just reminds me that if I’m not careful, my visits to the gym will be less a luxury and more a pressing necessity.

The idea that food carries associations with experiences isn’t novel. Food is the same as anything else that helps us remember – like pictures, smells and even songs. Lately, grocery shoppers have been able to bask in all their autumnal nostalgia with the ascent of the pumpkin spice plague. Be it curry, ravioli, almond milk, potato chips, hummus, scones, protein bars, polenta, peanut butter, kefir, Muesli or tofu stir-fry, Trader Joe’s has done an excellent job at reminding us all that indeed fall is here, lest we forget. Where it gets interesting is the glaring paradox that if we could actually recapture what four simple spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves) evoke, then it’s possible that we wouldn’t need to consume so many different pumpkin commodities. Quite the contrary, we would be simply content to just get another freaking pumpkin pie. Obviously that would be a lot less fun – what’s the point of having memories if we can’t remember them, play with them, manipulate them, even with something so mundane as a pack of ravioli?

No author was craftier with the elevation of the mundane than Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time is an entire literary work about how the human experience is encapsulated in our memories, so much so that the lines between the mundane and the significant are not only unclear, but almost invisible.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

This paragraph in Swann’s Way, the first installment in Proust’s magnum opus is often considered the “gateway” passage, seemingly encapsulating the manner in which our sensibilities can warp our involuntary memories, and visa versa, even in doing something so simple as eating a cookie.

Last Wednesday, I felt as if I had four separate run-ins with Proust, making me think about what it means to remember a piece of music. My morning began with a class at Juilliard on the genre of the string quartet in the twentieth century, taught by Dr. Kendall Briggs. Having spent several weeks on Debussy and Ravel, we were recently fast-forwarded to the music of Henri Dutilleux, in particular his most famous work, Ainsi La Nuit. We learned very quickly that his work for string quartet is not so much structured around the notion of occurrence and recurrence, but of event and recognition. What’s so elusive about it is that the “event” in question is not a melody, or even a specific harmony, but a “feeling” that one gets from the overtones of the first chord of the piece.

The chord, while sounding fairly complex, is simply a sandwich of three sets of two notes, each spaced five notes away from one another. Dr. Briggs had us all sit down at a piano and play it over and over to see what it “felt” like – indeed, the chord has some mystical quality to it that makes you remember with more than one of your senses. It’s as if your spine starts to tingle.

The chord comes back at various points in the piece, sometimes in ways you can tell, and sometimes in ways you can’t. But the real kicker is that the chord changes and shifts over the course of the piece, so by the end you get the same sensation as you had at the start of the piece, though the harmony has changed. Just as in Proust, our memories are not our own property, and things aren’t always as we remember them, though they may give us a familiar sensation. Something happens in the meantime – namely, life – that alters our ability for “accurate” recognition.

A couple of hours later, students in Dr. Joel Sachs’ performance practicum heard a performance of Charles Ives’ Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano. While Dutilleux openly acknowledged the influence of Proust’s writing upon his music, Ives’ sonata somehow offers an even more Proustian meditation, if possible. Like lots of Ives’ music, the entire sonata is based on American folktunes, specifically hymns. The opening movement Autumn begins with a fragment of the old American hymn “My Shepherd will Supply My Need,” a paraphrase of Psalm 23, with an emphasis on the notion of provision.

The sure provisions of my God attend me all my days;
Oh, may Thy house be my abode and all my work be praise;
There would I find a settled rest, while others go and come;
No more a stranger nor a guest, but like a child at home.

It starts quietly, but builds up in a frenzy, reflecting the harvest rush to gather and store what the past six months has been spent growing. It’s somewhat contrary to the images we normally have of rural New England in the autumn, the rustling of leaves, or some idyllic quietude. For Ives, he struggles really to recreate all the sensations of fall in Connecticut as accurately as possible, from the most quiet to the most frenetic, all with four simple notes from the beginning of the hymn.

Unlike Dutilleux, Ives really goes for the gut and chooses something totally explicit to build his Sonata around. While known as a WASP-y Yale educated insurance tycoon, Ives’ upbringing in rural Connecticut exposed him to a world far removed from insurance offices of urban America or the neo-Gothic buildings of the Ivy Leagues. In his constant resorting to folk tunes and hymns, there’s a tangible hankering to return to that with which he was brought up, his mornings in church, his afternoons in the countryside, the sounds of his father’s brass bands. While perhaps less familiar to us now, American hymnody was a pervasive part of American musical culture for so long, that at the time Ives wrote this piece, it’s unlikely the reference would have been lost so readily as it is now. And yet Ives at the same time chooses to be elusive with the fragment, going backwards and forwards from the sad to the confused to the joyful, as if to jumble the reference he so carefully chose. But like Proust’s madeleines, the sounds of songs and human voices can change when removed from their context – remembering isn’t the same as experiencing, and the convergence of the two in real time can be complex. In In Search for Lost Time, the narrator’s first encounter with the modern telephone is perhaps an even better illustration of the problems of memory and evocation, as he speaks to his ailing grandmother.

I heard that voice which I mistakenly thought I knew so well; for always until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the first time. And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me thus alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features, I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was . . . It was sweet, but also how sad it was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness drained almost – more than any but a few human voices can ever have been – of every element of hardness, of resistance to others, of selfishness! Fragile by reason of its delicacy, it seemed constantly on the verge of breaking, of expiring in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.

No matter how we try, life never really repeats itself, though the feeling or emotional weight of recurrence can be heavier than we think we can bear.

Much like reading Proust, you get started down a rabbit hole when you start thinking too hard about all this. Just as I see pumpkin spice pumpkinny pumpkin everywhere I go in the city, I started seeing the Proustian memory game in all of my scores. As musicians we’re taught to look for substantial building blocks like themes, subjects, counter-subjects, recapitulations, and other terms you might hear thrown around in AP Music Theory classes in high school. But if you start thinking in terms of what you can remember about a piece, or what the listener might latch on to, these foundational structures seal the deal. For instance, when you walk into a big gothic building, do you notice the brick work? Or the ornamentation, or the different styles of room, the paintings, the acoustic, or simply the sensation of being somewhere expansive?

Over coffee on Wednesday, I was clearing up some markings in my scores, fingering and cues, etc. And as I started listening to the pieces in my head and looked at the scores, I got the sensation that I was thinking about the structure all wrong. That is, I was thinking about it how I “ought” to think about it and not so much in terms of how it’ll come off to the listener, or how it might have come off to the composer when it was written.

Of the more curious works of Dietrich Buxtehude, his setting of the Te Deum looks like a row of notes on the page, seemingly endless, aimless and antiquated. But in coming back to the idea that pieces of music or even sections within them signify something outside themselves, be it in the past or even the present, I started to see how the first few pages of the Te Deum were a miniature time warp in their own way (as if looking at Buxtehude at a coffee shop on Columbus Avenue wasn’t time-travelly enough already).

There’s this wandering opening section, that is seemingly pointless or unrelated to the rest of the piece. It’s as if it’s merely an improvised introduction, setting the key and mood for the piece, one of gravity to reflect words of a hymn in praise of a grand omnipotence. It’s almost exactly like the music of Girolamo Frescobaldi, a kind of wacky Italian keyboardist who proposed an idea that music should always sound as if it was natural and improvised, permitting performers to take his toccatas at any speed they chose and even change the order of the sections of a piece to suit their taste.

But as I turned the page in Buxtehude, the style changes completely. It seemingly reverts to the style of Buxtehude’s teacher’s teacher, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, who mastered the art of creating incredibly complex music with only two lines of music, called a bicinium. Even if you’re not familiar with the styles, there’s a sensation that the music has jumped from the expressive to the stoic, from something vibrant to something medieval – the right hand is odd and angular, as if its trying to imitate some antiquated fiddle as it meanders around this plainsong chant.

But like a kaleidoscope, it gradually starts to change. Buxtehude adds in a third voice using his feet, while keeping the academic interplay of two voices going on overhead. The bicinium ends seamlessly, and you get something like a tricinium – a form that doesn’t really exist.

Before you know it, the organ is blasting in 8 voices, with as many stops as the wind supply of the instrument will sustain, including playing multiple voices at once with your feet.

I admit I was stumped by all of this for while. What did all these sections have to do with each other? They’re so different and strange that it felt like a clumsy collage. That’s when I remembered to look back at the bottom of the second page: in the final four bars, Buxtehude seemingly combined all of the elements that had come before into a single texture. The order of the notes was like Sweelinck, but their delivery was like Frescobaldi, all the while scintillating over a loud and low pedal note, indicative of the enormous section to come. It’s an exercise in memory for the listener – taking a lot disparate experiences and sounds and mediating their meaning into a single moment, a middle point of reckoning.

The case for arguing that Buxtehude did any of this consciously is slim, admittedly. But that’s not really the point – at times we have to start thinking about what’s going on once it leaves his hands and gets into ours. There’s nothing wrong with signposting, with picking out what we like, what signifies some sense of structure. We have to be open-minded to consider that it’s not always where we’re going to expect it, and that we may not even expect it all. It’s possible to remember things without realizing it!

They reminded me that it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination; for there are people – and this had been my case since youth – for whom all the things that have a fixed value, assessable by others, fortune, success, high positions, do not count; what they must have is phantoms. They sacrifice all the rest, devote all their efforts, make everything else subservient to the pursuit of some phantom. But this soon fades away; then they run after another only to return later on to the first.

Like my Halloween costume when I was nine, one can always be in search of a phantom with the various experiences and memories in our lives. If nothing in our lives were elusive, we’d get bored so, so quickly. I think it’s why so many people have frankly gotten bored with the election recently: there is no hope, no mystery, no sense of anything to come – just a vast abyss of stark anti-ironic reality that we’re stuck with it all. For me music has fantastic way of bringing out elusive ideas, even countering the mundane, the obvious and temptation to just pack it in accept it all at face value. If you think about, my Buxtehude score is itself is a paradox, at once taking up space in my backpack, but not coming to fruition until it starts taking up time when I perform it. It is itself a phantom through which to find more phantoms both in its pages, or to even to remember the nine year old Phantom of Opera who rode around with his grandmother on Halloween.