Gladys Knight auditions Pips

I always wanted to be a Pip!

Bring me my bow of burning gold

After doing the Beethoven, it was nice to get back to our church choir and a bit less intensity. Also we're doing a song I love, as a William Blake fan -- and it's a great song of social action.

Jerusalem

AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

William Blake

This song fits very well with the community dialog concerning poverty, rising from the library's community read of Nickel & Dimed. Neither is this a big stretch from our recent travels to Transylvania, as we contemplate what we are called to do for our friends there. I usually find things to like in Blake, but this is a favorite, reminding us how we are all empowered with marvelous tools and called to use them in larger struggles.

Diesen Kuss der ganzen Weld

Last night, I was fortunate to sing with 150 other people in a Community Chorus performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra. It was a wonderful opportunity, a difficult piece to sing, and ultimately a truly powerful experience. Several of us commented after ward that it went by so quickly. It's a demanding piece and requires physical and mental focus and energy, so much so that the time slips away.

One of the gifts music gives is the requirement to be "in the moment", and we got to spend six months of preparation in order to spend a long moment in a bit of Beethoven's world. Even after repeated listenings to several recordings of the work, even after rehearsing so long and so often -- daily practice and twice weekly rehearsals for the past couple weeks, I barely scratched the surface of Beethoven's musical art. The tempo shifts, dynamics and harmonies brought a high degree of drama to Schiller's transcendent words.

And then there's the experience of singing together with 150 people. This was another new experience for me and there's tremendous power in so many people working together to create a tightly constructed performance. We were fortunate to have a gifted choir director in Austin Boncher, who surely has a great love for music and teaching in order to build a choir from scratch. Austin needed patience, persistence, humor and talent to bring us together and help us climb to where we needed to go. And all that was just to get us ready for the symphony, soloists and conductor. To complement all that talent and create the synergy of the fourth movement was a unique privilege. To sing with eleven people form our church choir as well as three other people from the library was all frosting on the cake!

Freude, for sure!

Spirit of Life

10 year old Orsy Mate sings at the farewell party after Easter service, while Tony records her and her brother Zsolt and Andy look on. (video taken with Treo cellphone)

Beer Barrel Polka in Transylvania

A party at the Koppandi parsonage in Torocko-St. George: Dean dances with Eva Koppandi while Boti plays; Zoli claps & sings. The "Beer Barrel Polka" -- fun in any language!

How Can I Keep from Singing?

I'm a lucky guy, in lots of ways. But one way of which I am conscious is the ability to make music and sing with people. The last week is a case in point. After our Irish band, Celtic Knot, played a full slate of gigs around St. Patrick's Day (one story from this is on the New Cybrary), I had four nights which included two rehearsals for a folk music gig with friends Doug Wheeler and Barbara Hoffman, a rehearsal for singing Beethoven's Ninth as part of a community choir and then the gig with Doug & Barbara at the Brewed Awakenings coffeehouse. Lucky, lucky to have friends who want to play and sing and a community offering opportunities.

Music is tied up with my spirituality in ways I am still exploring and seeking to understand. Certainly it points to connections with other people and with stories, and a fundamental way of looking at the world, involving beauty, creativity, melody, rhythm and harmony. At a later time, I'll write something particularly about singing the Beethoven, which is a new realm of experience.

Right now, I'm trying to get my backpack guitar and some music ready to take to Transylvania, where some of our pilgrims will share music & I hope I can learn some songs.

Find a stillness

There's a Transylvanian hymn in our UU hymnal:

Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness carry me.
Find the silence, hold the silence, let the silence carry me.
In the the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power,
I will find true harmony.

The song speaks to one of my favorite parts of our weekly services at Fox Valley UU Fellowship: the silent meditation or prayer. The Buddhist gong that rings at the beginning and end carries me in and out of the silence and challenges me to find an inner stillness. I feel that the entire service revolves around this moment of quiet, the eye in the storm of ideas, sights, joys, concerns and sounds.

As it turns out, it's deceptively easy to play a simple version of "Find a stillness" on guitar, so its one of the songs our pilgrim group will take with us to Transylvania. We may even sing it in church there, as three of us have been part of our choir. It seems fitting that we carry this song back to its home, as a bond between our congregations, as the stillness is a common place for us all.

Bodhran

This is just 'cause I'm proud of my bodhran and I wanted to try posting a photo from my phone to the blog.

I hand-colored the bodhran with a design from from friend and band-mate Gary Arndt. We play together as two-thirds of the band Celtic Knot. The two of us got invited to play as part of the Foods of All Nations fund-raiser for the multicultural center. Was I there as the library director, a musician or a community member? Who cares? We had fun.