Katrina; Clara Barton
I can't add anything of any significance to all that has been said about the disaster, so I just offer my useless feelings of sadness and what money I can through the aid agencies. My wife is the principal at a local Catholic school where they have just taken in the kids in a family (or two?) displaced by the hurricane. This is the right thing to do. The upper administration is trying to control the process, but they seem to have proven time and again that their heads are in the wrong place and so I wouldn't trust them to be terribly helpful. This seems to me to be a parish community-level missionary endeavor and should be handled that way.
In my professional life, I seem to be getting pieces published more regularly, which is nice. Rob Child is working on Clara Barton, the last I heard from him, so hopefully this job will indeed come through and make up for the income loss of not teaching in the music department at Aquinas College this year. I miss the students and the subjects, but I don't miss the across-town drive four days a week.
Some local church music directors got together last week to hear compositions for church use by area composers. There were five of us presenting and I heard a lot of nice pieces, some of which I absolutely sure I'll use. I wasn't terribly well organized in that my samples were shrunk to save on paper (20 pages down to 4 legal size double sided-- but wait, who cares?) whereas others gave out much better looking presentations of their work. I don't pay enough attention to image, I guess. Still, the music doesn't care what it is printed on as long as it is readable, and the audience gave a good reading of mine and everyone else's stuff. I think the things I contributed that had the most impact were psalm settings that borrowed idioms from spirituals and jazz-- I believe that the psalms of lamentation are particularly suited to this emotional style of writing and this was born out in the response to these compositions. We'll see if the publishers like them or not, I guess.
I see Ophelia is threatening Florida-- looks like some more lamentation may be in order.
In my professional life, I seem to be getting pieces published more regularly, which is nice. Rob Child is working on Clara Barton, the last I heard from him, so hopefully this job will indeed come through and make up for the income loss of not teaching in the music department at Aquinas College this year. I miss the students and the subjects, but I don't miss the across-town drive four days a week.
Some local church music directors got together last week to hear compositions for church use by area composers. There were five of us presenting and I heard a lot of nice pieces, some of which I absolutely sure I'll use. I wasn't terribly well organized in that my samples were shrunk to save on paper (20 pages down to 4 legal size double sided-- but wait, who cares?) whereas others gave out much better looking presentations of their work. I don't pay enough attention to image, I guess. Still, the music doesn't care what it is printed on as long as it is readable, and the audience gave a good reading of mine and everyone else's stuff. I think the things I contributed that had the most impact were psalm settings that borrowed idioms from spirituals and jazz-- I believe that the psalms of lamentation are particularly suited to this emotional style of writing and this was born out in the response to these compositions. We'll see if the publishers like them or not, I guess.
I see Ophelia is threatening Florida-- looks like some more lamentation may be in order.
posted by Nick Palmer at 9:32 AM
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