My Two Cents

News Flash from the Arctic Circle

Sat, 7 Nov 2009 20:46:57 -0600

My voice student David Duncan certainly knows how to celebrate a birthday. On the very same day that he turned 19, David also sang his way into the semi-finals at NATS - one of three Carthage singers to do so. It was nice to have that kind of success at a competition in which we are head to head with the best singers from every college and university throughout the state. And yet, the sad reality of NATS is that while we had three people advance, we had at least fifteen singers who did not. And that’s the bitter pill of this kind of competition..... and although we do our best to remind our students that this is how it almost always is, I’m sure it is still hard for them to accept the fact that it is entirely possible to go in there and sing very very well and yet come away with nothing but compliments. That’s why I really like this picture from the evening meal which almost all of us enjoyed Friday night. If you would look around those booths which the students occupied, you would have been very hard pressed to know who had been “successful” and who had come up empty. Part of the reason is that it was just nice for us to be all together - eating good food- plus enjoying the fun of a birthday party, complete with party hats and noisemakers that I bought at a neighborhood Target. In the midst of all that, I think (or at least I hope) that each student felt less like a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ . . . but just colleagues, all of whom had stepped in front of judges and sang their hearts out. Some sang as well as they ever had- others for one reason or another fell short of their full potential. But they all did it and that counts so much more than whether or not you have earned any sort of award.

Some other NATS thoughts:

***One of my other voice students, Andrew Johnson, who started Carthage as a piano major but who recently changed his focus to singing, was attending NATS for the very first time- and as luck would have it, he woke up Friday morning feeling significantly under the weather. But even with his voice way below 100%, Andrew managed to sing remarkably well. (I’m glad I got to hear him perform.) Andrew is blessed with a truly spectacular talent, and it is so fun to see him exploring that in such exciting ways. But I can safely say that I’ve never been prouder of Andrew than I was yesterday morning. His perseverance was so very inspiring.

***Yet another of my voice students, freshman Chase Tonar, was dangling over the precipice of disqualification because somehow neither he nor his accompanist had an original score for his English language piece, Gerald Finzi’s “Who is Sylvia?” (At NATS xerox copies are absolutely forbidden and grounds for immediate disqualification.) Unfortunately, I didn’t get word of the difficulty until I was already past Milwaukee and well on my way to Eau Claire - and as I drove the rest of the way, I could feel the hairs on my head turning even more gray. I had to hope that one of the voice teachers at Eau Claire would have the Finzi book in question.... and would be willing to lend it to me. Fortunately for me and for Chase, there was a teacher with the book who was nice enough to lend it to me--- and Chase, I am very happy to say, got to sing in his first NATS competition and by all reports sang quite well . . . and his teacher managed not to have a stress-induced stroke.

*** Speaking of disqualifications for xerox copies, I ended up making what amounts to a Citizen’s Arrest at NATS this year. It happened when I listened to one of my students perform in the preliminary round and then stuck around to hear the singer right after him. (I enjoy scoping out the competition.) To my utter amazement, this young man’s piano player laid three original scores on top of the piano but then proceeded to play her three accompaniments out of a three-ring binder of xerox copies- a NATS cardinal sin. The judges did not say a word about it- and the singer was done singing and had left the room, the judges did not say a word about it, which left me to assume that they hadn’t noticed the infraction. But I had. (And I even took a surreptitious photo of it.) And I went right to the tabulation room to inform them of what I had seen. But here’s the most amazing part about the whole thing. After they thanked me for bringing this to their attention, they asked me for the singer’s name. And when I said his name, one of the three teachers working there in the tabulation room said “That’s my student.” But as began to sputter out an apology, he cut me off with sincere reassurance that I had done the right thing and that I should not feel bad about it. Hearing those words from this teacher is among the most inspiring moments I have ever experienced at NATS.

*** I rode to the rescue under very surprising circumstances during the sophomore men’s semi-final round . . . the very semi’s in which my student David Duncan sang (and sang very well, by the way.) David was supposed to go last, but the room monitor asked him to go out of order because someone’s piano accompanist was tied up playing in another semi-final. So David went ahead, but when he got done this other young man’s accompanist still wasn’t there- and the judges were about to scratch him. So I raised my hand and offered to play for the guy - just to prevent him from being disqualified. And seeing no alternative, the young man gratefully accepted my offer. The first two pieces went fine (I’d played those two songs a million times before) but the third was an aria from Benjamin Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ that I’d never seen before- never heard before- and had more accidentals per measure than anything I’ve ever played in my life. I did the best I could, but it felt like 90% pure guesswork (including several moments when I was tempted to just stand up, turn around, and plop my butt on the keys- thinking that would sound about as good as what I was trying to do with my ten fingers) and I’m very impressed that this young man managed to keep singing despite the odd sounds emanating from the piano.

*** But that spontaneous rescue mission was not even my most heroic moment at the keyboard. That came when I played for a marvelous Carthage student named Audrey Henning, one of our three semi-finalists. The first of her three pieces was an amazing song by Schubert titled “Gretchen am Spinnrade” - which also happens to be an especially tricky piece for the pianist to play because the accompaniment is crafted to imitate the constant whirring of a spinning wheel. Anyway, as we neared the increasingly frantic final measures I did my last page turn a little too emphatically and suddenly found the score on my lap instead of on the piano’s music rack. But somehow I never missed a beat and that spinning wheel kept spinning to the last measure. . . maybe with a bump or two along the way, but definitely spinning.

*** Our yearly state NATS competition rotates amongst various campuses around Wisconsin: Eau Claire, La Crosse, Whitewater, Madison, Milwaukee, Stevens Point, Lawrence ... and Eau Claire is the farthest away it can possibly be for us. But there’s something kind of fun about traveling halfway to the Arctic Circle because it lent some extra excitement to the proceedings. And yet, for as far away from home as we were, I had the astonishing experience of being recognized at Applebee’s. As I spoke to the hostess about reserving an additional booth for six students who were joining us later, the young woman looked at me with rather strange expression- and then asked me if I were a music teacher in Racine. It turns out that she was a graduate of Case High School and had played in the orchestra there and remembered me from some concert I had conducted there or been a part of. I love those << Small World, Isn’t It? >> moments like that.

*** NATS is fun . . . but it’s also terribly frustrating, and not just because Carthage is a ‘David’ competing head to head with ‘Goliaths’ like Lawrence or UW-Milwaukee. It’s also hard because so very often a truly wonderful performance will not result in advancement, but the judge’s ballots will not mention a single thing that should have been different or could have been better. (It is drummed into NATS judges to be as positive as possible, but a ballot telling a singer how wonderful they are (but they don’t advance) is both useless and irritating.) And it was an especially frustrating year for our musical theater students, who seemed to fall prey to a definite bias towards very classical-style musical theater singing. It underscores one of the hardest things about singing for competitions and auditions- which is that you can never know for certain what a given person is looking for or wanting to hear. . . that is, you can’t know until you’re done singing for them, at which point it’s too late to do anything about it. So all you really get to do is Be Yourself and SIng As Well As You Possibly Can. . . and the rest of it is simply beyond your control. And that’s probably an invaluable lesson not only for our singers to learn . . .but just about anyone. The sooner you fully accept just how much in this life is beyond our control, the sooner you can just Go For It without undue worry about the results. And interestingly enough, those are the moments when we almost certainly do our best.

Tryggare kan ingen vara

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 07:01:06 -0600

Yesterday was the funeral of a much loved member of Holy Communion, Gloria Bolm, whose death came rather unexpectedly and entirely too soon. One of the pieces of music requested by her family was “Children of the Heavenly Father” - in Swedish - and after listening to the Carthage Choir grapple with the Swedish lyrics of Hugo Alfven’s “Aftonen” over the last few weeks, I was well aware of how tricky it would be for me to do an even halfway decent job with this request. But the family was so anxious for this to be sung, that I decided to do the best I could. I eventually found a youtube video of the Augustana College Choir singing this hymn in Swedish- and thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever heard. (And as a Nordic Choir alum, who now plays for the Carthage Choir, it takes a lot for me to pay such a lavish compliment to another Lutheran college choir, but they earned it fair and square.) And thanks to watching that video, I was able to sort out most of the Swedish just in time for yesterday’s funeral. And I have to say that singing this beloved old hymn in this way and for this particular occasion is one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had at a funeral. It meant breathing wonderful new life into a hymn that I have known backwards and forwards for as long as I can remember.

Whenever I sing this hymn, I think back to a memorable Tuesday morning my junior year in college. The night before had been auditions for the solos for that year’s performances of Handel’s “Messiah” - and since I had sung “But who may abide” my sophomore year, I decided to go for “The Trumpet Shall Sound” this time around. But that aria did not suit me nearly as well as the other one did, and to make a long story short, I ended up not getting any solo whatsoever my junior year. (Marshall is the one who went to check the posting of solo assignments, and when he came back to tell me that I wasn’t on the list, I honestly thought he was joking- but it was no joke. My sophomore year I had been one of the soloists- but my junior year, I would be back in the chorus. It was the single biggest blow I’d ever experienced in my life - and I still feel so badly that I put Marshall in such an awkward spot by having him look at the list for me. I was pretending that I was too nervous to look, but in fact I wasn’t at all - I was sure I would have a solo again but I was just trying to inject a little extra drama into the proceedings. Little did I know just how much drama there would turn out to be. )

Anyway, I walked around in a daze for awhile, trying to process the pain and embarrassment I was feeling - and wanting desperately not to talk with anyone. Eventually I found myself at morning chapel, but sitting way off to one side, doing everything short of holding a sign that read “I want to be left alone.” Then the opening hymn was introduced: “Children of the Heavenly Father” - and just as we all began singing the first verse, a senior named Ellen slipped right next to me. We didn’t know each other very well- but that morning we were cut from the same cloth, because her name was also missing from the soloist list after having been a soloist the previous year. And unlike me - a junior with another year to try - Ellen was a senior with no more chances, so her disappointment had to be still more acute. Anyway, I am sure that is why she chose to sit next to me at chapel- and when we got to the fourth stanza and the words “though He giveth or He taketh. . .” I felt Ellen’s head resting on my right shoulder - not so much in grief or seeking comfort but more of a lighthearted, friendly gesture- as if to say “ain’t it the truth?!? and nobody in this room knows what these words mean better than we do right now!” And of course, those next lyrics are the most important of the whole hymn: “Though He giveth or He taketh, God His children ne’er forsaketh.”

That was exactly thirty years ago this fall - and it is still utterly impossible for me to sing this hymn or even merely hear its melody - without thinking back to that morning when i felt like Wile E. Coyote suddenly flattened by a grand piano that had been unexpectedly dropped on me from above. The words of this hymn remind us that we both win and lose - laugh and cry - soar and fall - in this life. . . but through all of that, and especially in those moments which leave us completely bewildered, we are not alone. And as I sang this hymn yesterday, I hope the family of Gloria Bolm was somehow reminded of the same thing.

pictured above: I love this picture of Kathy reading to our niece, Lorelai.

The Bachelor

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 08:33:54 -0600

It’s been a strange few days around here, because Kathy and several friends from church have been spending the last four and a half days down in Orlando, Florida. (It’s a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.) That means that I have been the only adult around here, which is a rather scary thought- but Bobbi and Ellie and I have managed to survive if not thrive in her absence. Some highlights:

* I must confess that I did not cook a single meal while Kathy was gone. The closest I came was when I browned some ground turkey that I noticed was about to expire - but I gave it to the dogs. (Actually, I mixed it with their regular dog food.) The second closest I came to cooking was when I opened up a bag of Chex Mix with my bare hands. Otherwise, I let the good folks at Soup Depot, Subway, Taco Bell, Chipotle Grille and McDonald’s do the cooking. (They do such a nice job.) Except . . .

* . . . I did indulge in a special meal at Sweet Tomatoes down in Waukegan. My wife will not even consider going there after a nasty experience earlier in the year when she became violently ill a few hours after eating there. So on those occasions when she is out of town, that’s my chance to sneak down to Waukegan and taste some Moroccan Lentil and Garbanzo Bean Soup and other uncommonly delicious (and healthy) treats. Sarah Gorke and Nick Sluss-Rodionov kept me company, which made it even more fun. Then for dessert I had us go to the Baker’s Square restaurant by Gurnee Mills - a hop skip and a jump from Sweet Tomatoes - because I knew that one of my Carthage voice students was working there that night - and it was so fun to surprise him there. (And the slice of French Silk was positively sinful.)

* I let the dogs sleep with me . . . something that is absolutely impossible to do when it’s Kathy and me. The first two nights it went just fine, but Saturday night they must have crowded me because when I woke up the next morning I felt like five Irish dancers had rehearsed right on top of me. So last night, I had to leave the dogs downstairs - and the look they gave me seemed to say “Wait a minute! I thought we were friends!”

* My wife seems to think that Ben Gay is part of some terrorist plot because she can’t stand the smell of it - and believes it to be nothing but a placebo. But I gotta tell ya that Sunday evening, when my neck and shoulders felt their worst, I slathered on Ben Gay by the gallon. (I had on so much, it made Andrew Johnson’s eyes water during his makeup lesson. I’m serious.)

* I drove Kathy’s vehicle rather than my own- and learned the hard way that if Messing Up A Car were an Olympic sport, I would be that guy from Jamaica whose last name is “Bolt.” In the blink of an eye, I managed to turn Kathy’s car into a rather disgusting echo of my own - and only some intensive cleaning this evening.... plus a trip to the car wash to use the vacuum.... allowed me to restore it to its former beauty.

* My biggest indulgence of all was in bringing up Met Player on the Metropolitan Opera’s website and playing opera excerpts full blast. The dogs didn’t seem to mind- and I loved hearing Leontyne Price’s voice rattle the windows.

But I am more than willing to put aside all those bachelor pleasures. . .. opera at full blast . . . supper at Sweet Tomatoes . . . Ben Gay by the gallon . . . because it will be so good to have my wife back home again. Just waking up next to her is worth all of those bachelor indulgences times ten.

pictured above: One of Walt Disney’s most famous bachelors, as he resides in Downtown Disney.

Flu Away

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:36:39 -0500

It’s amazing how instantaneously a sunny sky can turn dark and ominous - and I experienced one of those wrenching emtional reversals yesterday morning. I was walking out of Madison’s Monona Terrace with Dad and Nathan, still on Cloud Nine (or at the very least, Cloud Eight-and-a-half) because of the fine singing which the choir had done for the state music teacher’s convention and the halfway decent job I had done of accompanying them. But in an instant all of those good feelings of pride and pleasure were curdled when my dad told me that my young nephew Kaj had gone into the hospital the night before, a victim of the H1N1 flu which has been such a frightening scourge across the country and claiming lives with vicious heartlessness.

I don’t know if my dad purposefully kept the news from me until after I was done playing for the choir - I sort of doubt he would have thought about that - but no matter the reason he waited, I am so glad he did. I had my hands more than full with some tremendously difficult piano accompaniments and the thought of playing those in front of a room full of music teachers was a bit terrifying. If I had played those accompaniments while thinking about my precious nephew lying a hospital bed, it would have been a complete catastraophe. At least I heard the news after all that playing was done- but it left me in such a daze that I drove through three stop signs in the Monona Terrace parking garage plus I missed the exit altogether. (And I’m not kidding.) And for the rest of the drive to the downtown Sun Print Cafe and all through the meal we shared there, all I could really think about was little Kaj.

Whenever someone that young falls seriously ill, it feels utterly wrong - as though some sort of bizarre rift in the universe has turned things upside down from the way they are supposed to be. A 7-year-old is not supposed to be lay in a hospital bed, fighting for breath. Maybe a 77-year-old who has lived a long life and simply worn themselves out. But not a 7-year-old with so much living yet to do.

And especially not a 7-year-old as precious and gentle and joyous as Kaj. With all due respect to all wonderful children everywhere, I don’t know anyone who has a sweeter or more selfless spirit than Kaj - which is why the thought of this befalling him of all people is so bewildering. And it is not as though Kaj has lived a charmed existence up until now- this is a young man who has endured several surgeries with more very likely in his future, who lives with serious deformities to both hands and both feet and other complications to his health. But when you meet him, you would never guess all of that in a million years. Kaj is so quick to smile, loves to play, genuinely cares about others, and just makes you so glad to be alive. Yes, I’m an entirely biased uncle speaking here, but ask anyone who knows him and they will echo everything I’m saying and more.

So I am mad as heck at whatever little viral demon took aim at my nephew and pulled the trigger and sent him to the hospital, fighting for breath. And I’m haunted by a recent story on 60 Minutes about H1N1 which focused on a vibrant high school football star who ended up in intensive care, literally fighting for his life. The thought that little Kaj is facing the very same enemy is terrifying. And I won’t have a full smile on my face again until Kaj is back where he belongs . . . out in the world, making the sun shine a little brighter on the rest of us.

P.S.- As I finally “go to press” with this blog entry, I’m happy to report that Kaj made a quick and emphatic recovery - is out of the hospital - and in fact felt up to doing a tiny bit of trick or treating late Saturday afternoon. So all feels right with the world again.

pictured above: This is a photo I took of Kaj in the late summer, when I slipped over to Decorah for a quick visit before the craziness of the school year commenced. The image is a tiny bit blurry, but I just love the expression on my nephew’s beautiful face.

Approaching Perfection

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:43:46 -0500

Yesterday, bright and early - brutally early, in fact - the Carthage Choir had the privilege and honor of performing for the Wisconsin State Music Teacher’s Convention in Madison. It’s an honor which does not come along every day, and what made it an even more exciting experience for the school is that both the choir and the band were invited to perform. It’s a rather scary and intimidating situation because you are performing for an audience comprised largely of music educators who can certainly discern the difference between good and great music-making. . . and doing so in a room which is not even close to being a proper concert hall. Throw in the matter of singing practically at the crack of dawn and you end up with all kinds of reasons to be nervous.

The conductor of the choir, Eduardo Garcia-Novelli, has known about this opportunity for quite some time, so from the very first day of rehearsal this fall every bit of effort has been focised on being properly prepared for Madison and to demonstrating to everybody there that the Carthage Choir is singing on an altogether higher plane than at any time in its recent history. And to achieve that goal, it was impossible to play safe with relatively easy music that could be easily polished and perfected in two months time. No, he went for the triple axel with some incredibly challenging pieces - and lo and behold, they have risen to the challenge splendidly - mastering not only some tremendously difficult music, but singing it with the kind of musicality and expressiveness that takes your breath away. And the group has become so much more mature in all matters, including attendance and punctuality - attentiveness - and something as basic as Watching The Conductor.

If there was any hiccup along the way, it apparently occurred this past Tuesday evening, when the group sang a concert which amounted to a dress rehearsal of its Madison program. They had also sung the program one week earlier and done spectacularly well - but this time around they were singing without an acoustical shell behind the risers to help gather the sound and allow the members of the choir to really hear one another. And without that shell behind them, everything suddenly felt much more tentative and the result was a performance that felt at least to many of the choir members like a giant step backward rather than forward. (I had to miss the concert, but the first hint I had of how the concert had gone was when a choir member posted on her facebook page about “tonight’s train wreck.” For a second or two, I allowed myself the conceit of thinking that their troubles might have had something to do with my absence on the piano bench, but no- my subsititute did a superb job - probably playing some of the pieces better than I do; this was about something else entirely. And by the way, I have it on very good authority that in no way shape or form was this concert a “train wreck” but I can understand how it might have felt like one to some of the singers.)

As I came to rehearsal the next day, I wondered if the choir members would be shuffling through the door, tail between their legs, their confidence deeply shaken. . . and I wondered if Eduardo would be cross and anxious. But in what I am tempted to describe as a miracle of sorts, the Carthage Choir had perhaps their best rehearsal of the year so far. Eduardo had them rehearse up in the chapel - the “Scene of the crime,” so to speak - as if he wanted them to get right back up on the horse which the night before had thrown them to the ground rather unceremoniously. And for 65 minutes, the choir and their conductor made exquisite music together. . . and there were more than a few moments when I found myself thinking to myself, “what they are doing here approaches sheer perfection.” It was profoundly moving - and incredibly impressive.

The next day (thursday) the choir was in Madison for a dress rehearsal in the space- a room at Monona Terrace- and again they sang with astonishing polish and beauty. And all the way back to Racine that evening (I had to return for chuch choir rehearsal, and then drive back to Madison later that night - I know, I’m crazy) I found myself reliving what I had heard in that rehearsal and the one the day before.... realizing anew that when you have 55 singers singing as one, there is nothing more powerful or impressive.

I wish I could say that the actual performance went as splendidly as those last two rehearsals did. Not quite. The room in which the choir sang was a deader room when there were lots of people sitting in it (we drew a pretty good sized audience) and that made it feel almost like an entirely different room - and not nearly as fun to sing in as it had been the day before. And although the students all got there by 7:30, as ordered, for a full warm-up, the fact remains that a choir cannot possibly sing at its best at 8:30 in the morning. (The band had it worse- playing their concert the day before at 8 in the morning.) Scheduling a choir to sing this early in the day is absolutely barbaric, in my opinion- and it makes about as much sense as scheduling an olympic swimming event to be swum in a log- laden swamp. And if I ever meet the person or persons responsible for the convention’s scheduling - most likely music teachers who certainly should know better- they will hear about it from me. And to drive home the point, I may even thrown in a couple of DARN IT ‘s just so they know I mean it.

But the main point I want to make is that the choir in fact came through with flying colors- and much of the audience (including my dad, who is not prone to giving standing ovations) was on its feet at the end, deeply appreciative of what the choir had managed to achieve. And though perfection evaded their grasp yesterday morning, they evoked for me memories of the great Vince Lombardi. I recently interviewed John Eisenberg, author of “That First Season,” which carefully chronicles Lombardi’s first season with the Packers - which began fifty years ago this fall. Lombardi did for the Packers what Eduardo has done for the choir - by creating an entirely new culture in which you expect and demand the best that people can give rather than just whatever they feel like giving you. And one of the things which Lombardi did which set the Packers organization on its collective ear was when he began using terms like Perfection and Perfectionism to describe his goals for the organization. And when challenged about the wisdom of that, Lombardi essentially said: Strive For Perfection, though it be Unattainable, for in the attempt, you will achieve True Excellence. The Carthage Choir is achieving an entirely new level of excellence this fall - and I think for the vast majority of choir members, that very Excellence has been almost intoxicating - much more so than the more transient pleasure of merely Having Fun or Getting The Job Done. They are learning that Being Excellent is an incredibly exciting thing, and makes all of the hard work it takes to get there more than worth it.

pictured above: the choir at the beginning of their concert in Madison. That’s my esteemed colleague Dimitri Shapovalov playing piano for Michael Haydn’s “Alleluia.” I took over from there and played the remainder of the concert.