Edmund Schweppe

I've been singing with my church's choir for a few years, now. Over those years, our music director has been gradually increasing the difficulty of the works we perform for the annual Music Sunday service. This year, in conjunction with the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington (Massachusetts), we put on Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

This, folks, was a bear and two thirds. The Wikipedia article linked above calls the Chichester Psalms "noted among performers for their musical difficulty", and that author ain't kidding. But we rehearsed them for the entire winter and spring. Judging from the congregation's reaction, we did pretty darn well.

We'll be singing them again on May 31st, at 10:00AM at the Arlington church (630 Mass Ave, and MBTA-accessible), in case any Boston-area folks are interested.

And I really have to wonder what our music director has up her sleeve for next year ...

- I think the clearest sign yet that the US auto industry is in trouble is the fact that I didn't see a single GM or Ford ad during the Super Bowl. I saw one Dodge ad, and all the rest of the auto ads were foreign brands such as Toyota, Lexus, VW, Audi and Hyundai(!). And the only pickup truck ads I saw were from Toyota.

- I'm impressed with my church choir. Our music director has been out for several days, which meant that we didn't have any choir practice last week and we had to get a replacement organist / choir director for today. Despite the almost total lack of practice (and despite some real flubs during warmups), we pulled off Copeland's "The Promise of Living."

- Today's Boston Globe Magazine included a long article on sex education, Let's Talk About Sex, which featured the Grades 7-9 version of the Our Whole Lives curriculum. And, yes, we do work hard at making OWL a safe enough place for youth to ask questions like "What is sex" without being ridiculed by their peers.

Church services canceled today on account of snow:

Our Sunday morning worship service, religious education program and all other activities at First Parish are canceled this morning, The roads are slippery right now and the weather prediction is that the worst part of the storm will be taking place during church time and make traveling home difficult.

I suspect the hardy Massachusetts farmers who founded First Parish back in 1683 would laugh at such an event. On the other hand, they had sleighs. On the gripping hand, our minister just emailed his sermon to everyone in the congregation.

Or, at least, a new record coming into the world!

My church choir just wrapped up our recording sessions for a CD full of Christmas music. It's a wide-ranging repertoire, including tunes from medieval times, Africa, Spain, England, Germany, Bohemia and the US. And I'm one of the basses!

I am really looking forward to this. It was my first time making a "professional" recording, and was a lot of fun even though we had to stop every once in a while and wait for motorcycles to pass by. The one downside to singing in the choir is that I usually can't hear what the whole piece sounds like, since I'm buried in the back with the rest of my section.

The CD should be out later this year, simplifying my Christmas shopping no end ...

This year, my church's music director has come up with no fewer than seven pieces for the choir to perform at tomorrow night's Christmas Eve service:

• In the Bleak Midwinter by Harold Darke
• Brich an, o schönes Morgenlicht by Johann Sebastian Bach (from his Christmas Oratorio)
• Lo! How a Rose E'er Blooming by Hugo Distler
• Lullay My Liking by Gustav Holst
• Glory to God by George Handel (from The Messiah, of course)
• The Shepherds Farewell by Hector Berlioz (from his L'Enfance Du Christ, Opus 25)
• In Dulci Jubilo by Michael Praetorius

Not to mention all the traditional carols.

The music will be wonderful. The parking - not so much. With better than a foot of snow still on the ground, there's no room for cars to overflow on the lawn. On the other hand, we in the choir will start rehearsing around seven thirty (for a nine PM service), so at least we'll be able to find places to park.

I was too brain-fried to blog about this when I got home, but we did this year's Our Whole Lives parent orientation session last night. It looks like we may have as many as thirty youth this year for the Grades 7-9 course - not quite the mob we've had other years, but a crowd nonetheless.

This will be the fourth year running that I've facilitated OWL. The previous three times, we'd covered the curriculum in roughly four months, by running two sessions per Sunday night and having several Friday - Saturday overnight meetings that covered four sessions each. We're trying something different this time around; we'll do one session each Wednesday night from October through April (skipping school vacation weeks) with a couple of Saturday morning double sessions. The original "plan" for this time had been to do single Sunday night sessions; that went out the proverbial airlock once it turned out that our church only had one facilitator (me) who could do Sunday nights. (Two others begged off this year and the other two had already committed to other Sunday activities.) Just to make life even more interesting since our church's DRE [3] left over the summer, and our interim DRE just started a couple of weeks ago. So specific dates, times, locations, etc. are still in a state of flux.

Meanwhile, our choir sang Randall Thompson's Alleluia as the offertory yesterday. We sang it for the first time a couple of years ago as the big highlight of Music Sunday. As I mentioned at the time, it's a seriously tricky piece for an utter amateur such as myself, and we spent a couple of months rehearsing it. Frankly, I thought our music director was nuts for trying to do it on such short notice this time around - but after a mere two weeks of practice, we blew the socks off the congregation. We are getting pretty dang good, if I do say so myself.

[1] With apologies for mangled pseudo-Tolkien. [2]
[2] Well, maybe not that many apologies.
[3] Director of Religious Education, for the non-UUs in the audience.

I just got back a little while ago from my church's annual Battenkill River canoe trip. The Battenkill was running pretty low this time, and I spent most of the trip in a kayak that I suspect wasn't quite big enough for someone of my poundage - so I ran aground an inordinate number of times in the shallow, rocky stretches. Worse, many times I couldn't push off against the rocks; I had to get out of the boat, walk it downstream a ways and get back in. Of course, this wasn't one of those "sit-on-top" kayaks; it was a whitewater boat that is not particularly easy to get into or out of. So there was a lot more in the way of aerobic and anaerobic exercise on this trip than I'd expected.

I also managed to run my car battery flat; I'd been powering my CPAP machine via an inverter off the cigarette lighter both Friday and Saturday nights, and didn't run the car on Saturday to recharge after Friday night. Good thing I keep a set of jumper cables in the car.

Despite those frustrations, however, it was a good time. The Friday night sky in particular was wonderfully clear, and we could easily see the Milky Way (a frustratingly rare sight in the Boston suburbs). Saturday was just about perfect - warm, low humidity, and sunny for most of the day. The traditional Saturday evening cookout was its usual success, even if we did run low on hamburger buns and had to substitute hot-dog rolls.

And I managed to get all packed up before the first thunderstorms rolled in Sunday morning ...

The effort to ban gay marriages in Massachusetts has been soundly defeated in the Legislature. From boston.com:

A proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was swiftly defeated today by a joint session of the Legislature by a vote of 45 to 151, eliminating any chance of getting it on the ballot in November 2008. The measure needed at least 50 votes to advance.

The vote came without debate after House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, Senate President Therese Murray, and Governor Deval Patrick conferred this morning and concluded that they have the votes to kill the proposal. Cheers echoed in the State House when the vote was tallied.

"In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure," Patrick told reporters after the results were official.

The three leaders - along with gay rights activists - spent the last several days intensely lobbying a dozen or more state representatives and state senators who had previously supported the amendment but signaled that they were open to changing their positions.

Because fewer than 50 of the state's 200 lawmakers supported the amendment, it will not appear on the 2008 ballot, giving gay marriage advocates a major victory in their battle with social conservatives to keep same-sex marriage legal in Massachusetts.

Opponents of gay marriage face an increasingly tough battle to win legislative approval of any future petitions to appear on a statewide ballot. The next election available to them is 2012.

Frankly, I suspect that the amendment would have lost at the polls if it had gotten on the ballot; gay marriage has been legal here for three years and the world has signally failed to end. Today, however, the Legislature did its job and kept a very bad proposal off the ballot. Congratulations to the Great and General Court, as well as to my married friends, fellow church members and neighbors.

Today's sermon in church was delivered by a Hampshire College anthropology professor, who just happens to be the daughter of one of the oldest members of the congregation. She was discussing Buddhism in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, and that was reasonably interesting. Her closing, though, struck a powerful chord within me. She was relating a conversation she'd had with an old friend regarding her career choices:

"I thought you wanted to be an activist."
"I am. I teach."

That really resonated with me, especially since tonight was the first night of this year's Our Whole Lives class. Forty-some youth (mostly eighth-graders) have set forth on this journey into fact-based, comprehensive sexuality education, with a dozen facilitators (including yours truly) helping to illuminate the way. I know that there are going to be some frustrating moments ahead, and some awfully long nights. But the payoff is worth it: for the youth, for the adults, and for myself.

I am an activist. I teach.

According to the Associated Press, via the Boston Globe:

BOGOTA, Colombia --A western Colombian city councilman wants to require everyone in town 14 or older to carry a condom to prevent pregnancy and disease, outraging local priests.

William Pena, a councilman in Tulua, said Wednesday he will present a formal proposal to force all men and women -- even those just visiting -- to always carry at least one condom. Those caught empty-pocketed could pay a fine of $180 or take a safe sex course, he said.

"Sexual relations are going on constantly," Pena told The Associated Press by telephone. "If you carry a condom, chances are you'll use it during the day. It's not going to be there forever."

Tulua has one of the highest rates of AIDS in Colombia, he said. The proposal will be debated by other town leaders and could go into effect by March, he said.

This'll be an interesting story to watch - especially since I'm about to start facilitating another session of Our Whole Lives, where I provide fact-based sexuality education to local eighth graders.

Full story here.

http://www.fpc-stow-acton.org/

Although perhaps the term should be UURL, we being a Unitarian Universalist congregation and all.

I mentioned last week that my church was going to hold a Flower Communion service, and that the local paper ran a story about what the service was going to be like.

Well, this week the paper reported on the actual service. ( Read more... )

After some of the awful things I read about today, it was good to be reminded of the good parts of the world. It's often too easy to forget the good stuff when it feels like I'm drowning in crap.

Flowers bring message of tolerance, diversity

More than half a century after Unitarian Universalist minister Norbert Capek was executed in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, a local church will keep his message alive June 5 by celebrating the Flower Communion service Capek first invented to promote tolerance and celebrate diversity.

That "local church" is my own First Parish of Stow and Acton.

( more details )

The June 5 ceremony will include a dramatic presentation about Capek performing the Flower Festival with prisoners at Dachau, a choral performance in Czech, and responsive readings written by Kafka during his own ministry.

We rehearsed the Czech hymn again last night. It's a beautiful piece of music, despite the challenge of getting through the thickets of consecutive consonants.
And, just in case anyone is interested, the service is this Sunday at 10:00AM at the First Parish Church of Stow and Acton, 353 Great Road, Stow, Massachusetts.

Yesterday was Music Sunday at my church. It's an annual event, with lots of choral pieces all centered on a common theme. The theme this year was "Alleluia"; this being a Unitarian Universalist congregation, we naturally had an eclectic mix of "Alleluia" pieces. Our introit was the traditional Hebrew round "Havanah Shirah". We closed with a medieval French piece named "Alle Psallete Cum Luiya", where we were actually expected to sound like we were singing through bagpipe chanters. In between these bookends, we threw in an African traditional Alleluia along with brief excerpts from the works of Berlioz and Mozart.

Our main work, though, was Randall Thompson's Alleluia. I'd never heard the piece before we started rehearsing it. It's a very challenging piece (at least for an amateur such as myself); each of the four vocal parts weaves in and out, the dynamics range from barely audible to full blast, and the lyric is simply "alleluia" constantly repeated! (Which, of course, meant that I couldn't cue off the text when I got lost.)

During rehearsals I was far too busy trying to master the bass line to really wonder why it was so slow and wistful. The one really energetic part of Thompson's Alleluia seems more defiant than ecstatic. The joyous celebration of Handel's famed Hallelujah Chorus is completely missing from Thompson's piece. But it wasn't until I heard the sermon, where our minister told the story behind the piece, that I understood why.

Randall Thompson wrote his Alleluia in July of 1940 - bare weeks after the Nazis smashed their way into Paris and chased the Royal Army into the Channel surf. The collapse of France shook Thompson badly, and it clearly affected his composition. Yet - instead of an elegy, or a requiem, or some other traditionally sorrowful form - Thompson chose to write an Alleluia. After hearing the sermon, and after a fair amount of reflection, I think I understand why.

"Alleluia!" isn't merely something to shout when everything is joyous and wonderful. We, as terribly fallible and shortsighted humans, need to keep an awareness of the beautiful parts of the world even when that whole world seems to be collapsing around our ears. The miserable weather of the last month hasn't done anything good for my disposition; neither has this awful cold that refuses to clear out of my lungs; neither has the interminable nitwittishness that passes for political leadership in Washington.

There is truly too much going on in my world for me to feel like singing alleluias to the Universe. Yet, as the minister's sermon rather bluntly said, these are the kinds of times when we most need to sing alleluias. These are the times when we need to remind ourselves that the good, the beautiful, the worthy and lovely are still here, all around us.

So. It's cold and rainy outside. The phone still doesn't work. My current contract involves twenty-five miles each way on highways which average at least three miles of backups a day. And my car is rapidly approaching the mileage level where the timing belt needs replacement.

But I won't let all that rule my life. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!