Goofus and Gallant join the youth choir

A few months ago, I became the very lucky inheritor of two big boxes of organ music when a friend helped her mom (a retired organist) downsize. I've enjoyed using many of the scores since then, but it wasn't until this morning that I got around to looking through a file folder of loose-leaf materials. I'm positively giddy about a wonderful find therein: four Goofus and Gallant-style illustrations, dating from about 1963, that use trite, pedantic musical snippets to instruct pimply, reluctant teens in in the proper decorum for Church Youth Choir. The pictures are numbered 1, 2, 4, and 8, so I'm clearly missing at least numbers 3, 5, 6, and 7, which, as we shall see, is a shame.

We begin with pedagogical illustration #1:

For those of you who do not read music, the hand-written tune at the top uses the same melody as "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush." All together now, children: "Which is the way to start the year?" Certainly not like poor Goofus on the left. He has a ripped shirt, and patched trousers that are too long for him and thus rolled up too much at the ankles. That's no way to dress for choir! Also, he can't read his music because he left his folder on the floor at the end of choir season last spring. His attitude problem is evidenced by a frown (although if we want to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he's justifiably ticked off that the illustrator has put a downward stem on the wrong side of the C in the second measure of the annoying song). Young Gallant, in contrast, is smiling and enthusiastic. He is holding his music slightly off to the side, so he can read the score and simultaneously watch the well-prepared cheerful choir director. His pants fit (and what a fine, ironed crease they have!) as does his clean button-down shirt with the pocket protector. His belt is cinched tightly, helping him hang onto his youthful soprano tessitura just long enough to sing the solo opening verse of "Once In Royal David's City" one last Christmas Eve.

Here's pedagogical sketch #2:

Everyone together now: "Which is the way to learn our songs?" On the bright side, both Goofus and Gallant have become crew-cut blonds, increasing their trustworthiness, but oh dear!--now Goofus is slouching. His cuffs are still too big, he's ignoring the choir director, and he's frowning sullenly at his music (although perhaps that pouty lower lip expresses consternation that the pedantic illustrator forgot to include the correct key signature in the cutesy ditty). He's also going to tip his chair over backward in a minute. (Because the rest of the choir is filled with Gallants, that calamity will be met with polite but awkward silence, rather than loud guffaws). Brown-nosing Gallant, meanwhile, sits at attention in his uncomfortable folding chair. He looks anxious because he is working so diligently to sightread well, lest he disappoint his kind and musically meticulous choir director.

Pedagogical picture #4:

What is in Goofus's mouth? Is that a hymnal? Goofus is going to lose some of his teeth doing that, but even damaged teeth won't get him out of choir. "Which is the way to be on time?," we attempt to sing in unison. Goofus probably would have been on time had the illustrator not trashed the meter in the first measure: 7-8 time is OK for Bernstein, but has no place in 1963 Youth Choir! Gallant, meanwhile, remains blissfully oblivious, not even noticing the key signature is wrong. What key signature has just an A flat? None of the standard Western keys, that's for sure. What kind of music is this choir singing?

Last but not least, pedagogical ditty #8:

"Which one is making the director mad?" Things have gone downhill fast (what did we miss in pictures 5 through 7?). Both Goofus and Gallant are shocked--shocked!--that they have to fit ten syllables into eight notes, and that whoever set the text put an unstressed syllable on a downbeat. For Heaven's sake, it's di-REC-tor, not DI-rec-tor. Goofus, in his disbelief, has let his score fall to his side, and even Gallant (who has let his hair return to its natural dark brown) is covering his book with his arm and refusing to sing.

My choir, of course, is filled with normal human beings rather than archetypes. When I showed them these treasures this morning, they didn't quite understand why I found them so uproariously funny, but I will post them on the music room door anyway for everyone's edification.

R.I.P. Leo and Beamer

On March 28, we lost Leo H. Rasbora. By the time we noticed he was gone, he had been mostly consumed by his tank mates. Born into a schooling breed, he became a loner following the Great Fish Tank Catastrophe of 2010. He never took to the four perky harlequin rasboras we added to the tank this past winter. Maybe they're the ones who ate him.

S usually tries to ease the transition from life to death for our aquatic pets. When he notices a clearly dying fish in the tank, he prepares a small container of tank water, gently transfers the fish, and then puts it in the freezer. This is an "old school" method. There's heated debate online regarding whether freezing is humane compared to other methods of euthanasia, but it does seem kinder than being eaten by your cohabitants.

As sometimes happens with couples that have spent their lives together, Beamer followed Leo out of this earthly realm last Sunday. She was 11, and had spent her last year in a frenzied procreative love affair with her unnamed mate, who in his time of loss appears to be less morose than hungry. It's hard to read the emotional state of a fish.

S froze Beamer. She was floating on her side by the time he got to her, quite likely already dead, but he wanted to ease her along just in case. This morning, I opened the freezer door and saw what I thought was a container of shiny silver toothpicks--another one of E's experiments, perhaps. But no, it was Beamer's dorsal fin, which hadn't quite fit into the plastic casket (a clean Chobani yogurt container, pineapple flavor). It was shocking to see her so undignifiedly frozen into a funerary chunk of ice.

Pondering these weighty thoughts, I googled "fish death," hoping to find something meaningful to say about fish and ice cubes. Thus I discovered a Wikihow article on How to Get over a Fish's Death: 7 Steps, for which someone was surely underpaid. My favorite suggestion is #5: "If you have things that remind you of your fish, put them in a scrapbook," although the photo of the toilet for #1 ("Give your fish a burial") comes in a close second. Don't miss the link at the bottom, How to Tell If Your Fish Is Dead: 9 Steps.

R.I.P. Leo H. Rasbora
In the staring contest with death, you emerged victorious
~2005-2013

Good night sweet Beamer
And schools of Angel Fish swim thee to thy rest
~2002-2013

Training on the ATT

C and I are gearing up for our first 10-mile race this coming Saturday. For this week only, "gearing up" means tapering back. We ran eight miles last Friday, three miles on Sunday and Monday, and we'll run another three tomorrow; that'll be all until we magically manage to run 10 miles--farther than we've ever run before--on Saturday. More experienced runners tell us that race adrenaline will pull us along.

At the beginning of last summer, I couldn't run hilly 5Ks without taking walk breaks, so it's a pretty big deal for me to run eight miles straight through. It helps to run with a friend who has a comparable pace; we hold each other accountable.

I've been doing all of this in the minimalist light blue Merrells I bought a year and a half ago. They're covered with yellow pollen and dirt, but they're holding up better than any shoes I've ever run in before, with several hundred accumulated miles. I'm now a minimalist shoe proselytizer. Talk to me about running and I will talk to you about how great these shoes are. I modified them a bit by inserting a pair of floppy soft insoles salvaged from a discarded pair of over-engineered, over-cushioned, over-controlling, over-realigning, over-trademarked running shoes, providing just enough of a barrier that I don't bruise my heels anymore when I step on sharp rocks.

For last Friday's run, C and I sampled a there-and-back stretch of the American Tobacco Trail that runs from southern Durham County (Fayetteville Road) into northern Chatham County (Pittard Sears Road). Thunderstorms the night before had tamped down the ubiquitous clouds of yellow pollen that are this season's curse. Everything was fresh and beautiful: clouds, bridges, trees, rivers, new leaves in dozens of different shades of green, blossoming redwoods and dogwoods, dancing yellow swallowtails, and a family of seven deer. At our turnaround point, we pined for a sip of water, and what should magically appear but this:

The trail extends for another nine miles or so further south; we clearly have more exploring to do.

A Claycophony of Instruments

Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye--
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages--
Thanne longen bloggers their blogges to update.

I'm thinking of Chaucer because yesterday, I was on a jog with my friend C, and something she said made me think of The Squire's Tale, in which the narrator claims he will not speak of something and then goes on for a while speaking of it. C said there's a name for that rhetorical flourish, and I've tracked it down on Wikipedia: Apophasis (more specifically, Paralipsis and Proslepsis).

Says the Squire:

This Cambinskan, of whom I have you told,
High in the palace, mounted on his throne
With crown and royal vestments sat alone,
And held his feast, so splendid and so rich
That in this world its like was not, of which,
If I should tell you all of the array,
Then would it occupy a summer's day.
Besides, it needs not here that I apprise
Of every course the order of service.
I will not tell you of their each strange sauce,
Nor of their swans, nor of their heronshaws.
Moreover, in that land, as tell knights old,
There are some foods which they for dainties hold.
Of which in this land the esteem is small;
There is no man that can report them all.
I will not so delay you, for it's prime,
And all the fruit of this were loss of time...

At the point in my education when I read The Canterbury Tales, it seemed that the narrator went on for pages and pages like this. As an adult, I see he didn't (maybe there are longer examples elsewhere in the text), but my memory of him inspires my blog today.

Thus, I will not tell you of the past year of running with C, training first for a 10K and now for a 10 mile race; of the weekly interwebs running assignments she signed up for and from which I mooched; nor will I tell you of our increasing endurance, nor how 5K, once strenuous, now feels brief.

Moreover, I will not so delay you by reporting on my renewed love affair with Robert Schumann, of my exploration of his Six Canonical Etudes (with which I was previously acquainted through Debussy's arrangement for two pianos), nor of their beauty on the organ, nor of my continued good but largely unrealized intentions to record and here upload my organ demos at Duke Chapel, so that I might learn from the listening thereof. Moreover, I will not mention the comment left by a YouTube listener regarding someone else's too-fast but otherwise accomplished performance of Bach's "Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist," BWV 671 (a piece about which I erstwhile wrote)--no, I will not mention the five words that cut to the quick, dissuading me from ever being so bold as to post anything but cute cat videos on YouTube; nay, I will not here type the patronizing punch: "This is a laudable start."

Instead, I will get to my primary point of the day (about which I will actually say little; there's probably a rhetorical term for that too): musical instruments made out of clay. I've blogged before about making clay flutes and, of course, chickarinas. Thanks to a request by a student at Claymakers, this past session I taught a class entirely devoted to making clay instruments ("Bells and Whistles: A Claycophony of Instruments"). We made ocarinas, flutes, penny whistles, rain sticks, drums, horns, vuvuzelas, and tooters, with some bells and bowls on the side (not surprisingly, pretty much anything you whap will produce a tone).

Barry Hall's fabulous book From Mud to Music served as our inspiration. Barry Hall's even more fabulous CD Terra Cotta made me and E drop everything one evening after dinner and rush out to Home Depot to buy PVC parts for a didgeridoo. The student who requested the instruments class ended up building an impressive didgeridoo-horn hybrid that is way cooler than PVC tubing can ever be.

This was a great class to teach, since it involved problem solving and engineering, music theory and physics, and rawhide (sorry cows) and roofing nails and holes and a willingness to make noise on the way to making music. (Did you notice all the conjunctions in that last sentence? The rhetorical term for that is Polysyndeton.)

Naturally, we ended the class with a potluck and jam session. Alas, I did not have time to bake jam bars, but one student did bring caramel Bugles.

Note: video has been edited to protect the embarrassed; you know who you are. Also, S insists the flute lick is "House of the Rising Sun," but that would mean I actually absorbed something other than classical music during my early youth, which is unlikely.

Men still in Lederhosen*

Same men in same Lederhosen, 27 months later.

*Note that men have slept, eaten, showered, attended work/school, changed clothes, and otherwise gone on with their lives between photo sessions.

Big Fish

One of the lessons I learned through my Penland experience last summer was to take advantage of the clay workshops offered closer to home--cheaper, faster, and easier to access (albeit not as scenic, and without the great food). I've taken three excellent workshops at Claymakers since then: one with Susan Feagin on screen printing and slip transfer, one with Kent McLaughlin on hand-making brushes (lovely brushes with bamboo handles and--oy--bristles cut from sanitized, neon-dyed deer tails from tackle shops; no matter how well cleaned or fluorescently colored, deer tails still feel and smell like deer tails and probably would have benefited the deer more than me); and one this past weekend with Alan Bennett on sculpting and raku-firing fish.

In about 30 hours, Alan took us from wet clammy clay to finished fired fish. We sculpted fish Saturday morning into early afternoon, encouraged them to dry in front of fans while Alan demoed glazing, and then gutted the fish from behind to thin their walls. They went directly into the electric kilns to dry, were bisque fired overnight, and remarkably came out mostly whole the next morning. We glazed and raku-fired Sunday afternoon, and everyone left with finished work by early evening. My main take-aways: how to make eyeballs and eyelids; how to sculpt a fish in under two hours; how to gut a solid form; and the knowledge that fish have eyelids, nostrils, lips, and ears. (As my friend N commented, "imagine that--it's like they have entire FACES!"; yet even with a tank full of fish at home, I'd never looked closely enough to notice anything but the lips. I now notice their nostrils, but remain unconvinced that they have eyelids.)

One of my fish--the last one I made, so the wettest on Saturday evening--cracked widthwise, from the dorsal fin through the tail and into the belly. He became my glaze test tile. I think the colors look a little too paint-by-numbers-ish, although friends in the workshop pulled out photographs of fish that have similarly discrete color transitions.

Fish two was a quick expendable extra--a whistle, to see how whistles make it through raku. The unglazed portions of clay blackened as the piece cooled outside the kiln in sawdust (when the sawdust burns, it creates a reduction atmosphere around the clay). The eyeball whites and the fangs, made from porcelain, were brushed with a solution of gerstley borate to keep them from blackening.

I saved the largest fish for last. It was the first one I made on Saturday and consequently had enough time to dry prior to bisquing that it didn't crack. I worked harder at blending the colors on this guy. It's hard to see in the photo, but there's a lovely fluid transition on the body from red to yellow to vaguely green, with no crackle on the spots and lots of crackle on the belly. The head merges from blue at the nose to greenish with hints of red and yellow at the gills.

Pipes, pots, and espionage

Almost every weekday from 12:30-1:30pm, an organist is in Duke Chapel playing a demonstration recital on the Flentrop, Aeolian, or Brombaugh organ. A friend and I are privileged to share the Tuesday organ demo slot; each week, we trade off who plays and who turns pages/pulls stops.

This past Tuesday, my friend played was Bach's 5-part fugue, "Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist," BWV 671. That was the first piece I ever played on the Flentrop some six or so years ago; my organ teacher had decided I needed to feel the weight of the piece on a large tracker organ rather than on the humble 8-stop Walker I play at work. Hearing the piece again on Tuesday made me sentimental for the exhilaration of that first ride.

It turned out that the Wednesday organist couldn't play this week, so I took the subbing opportunity and played the Kyrie. I brought my flip camera to see if it would capture the immensity of the sound. It did a decent job under the circumstances (under the manuals, on the floor), though the massive pedal pipes don't shine through the mush at all. For the record, I get nervous when I know I'm being watched, even if it's only by a camera aimed at my feet; this comes through in the performance, yet given how tense my ankles were, my feet look surprisingly boring (spiffy striped socks excluded).

In pottery news, I'm delighted that a photo of one of my teapots was accepted for Lark's second volume of 500 Teapots, due out in August 2013. I actually don't know which teapot, since I submitted two with the same mellifluous title ("Untitled, 2009"), but it'll be one of these two:

In other news, we took a trip to Washington, D.C., over winter break. One of the many museums we visited was the International Spy Museum, where the signs admonished us not to take photographs. At the same time, the exhibits featured multiple real-life spy cameras that had enabled undercover agents to discretely capture intelligence on film. Rebel that I am, I was consequently inspired to snap some illicit photos inside the museum. Of course, I can probably say farewell to a career in espionage after posting the images here, but so it goes.