Midlife Meditation

It was August, 2007, and I was grieving.   I'd been engaged for almost a year, but it was becoming clear to me that relationship was coming to an end. Marriage plans had been indefinitely postponed, and finally the decision had been made to put the engagement on hold. There was a final vacation together, at Lake of the Woods, and then I drove my children back to Idaho Falls. Dropping them off with their mother, I pointed my car back west, with an eye to doing some solo camping at Pettit Lake, a beautiful alpine spot in the Sawtooth National Forest my family had visited many times in my childhood. There were some hitches in that plan: for the second time that summer, I'd gone camping without my tent; the road to the Sawtooths was blocked for several hours by a traffic accident; and once I finally made it to Pettit Lake, with the sun already setting, I found the campground both far more developed than it had been in my childhood, and all b...

Until recently, the Pacific Northwest lacked cities big enough to support boutique retail outlets. Most municipalities relied on a single store for most of their purchasing needs, and in many of those towns, that store was Fred Meyer. I first encountered a Fred Meyer store when I was in high school, and my family would drive into Corvallis to do our shopping. If we just needed groceries, we'd hit the local IGA or Safeway, but if we needed groceries, clothing, hardware, pharmaceuticals, electronics, toys for the kids, and so on, and wanted it all under the same roof, the place to go was Fred Meyer. At first I loved shopping there, but as I became an adult and my needs became more specialized, I found myself frequently frustrated at the limited selection available at whichever Fred Meyer I was visiting. They simply couldn't afford to stock shoes for my extra-wide feet, records of obscure classical works for my esoteric tastes, or books by even more obscure science fiction auth...

  Peter Schickele didn't say it, but if it wasn't for him, I probably would never have known it.   Peter Schickele, in case you're not familiar with him, is an American composer and humorist most famous as the man who discovered and curates the music of PDQ Bach, last and least of JS Bach's many children. The music is all intentionally awful, laden with quotes of popular songs, voiced on bizarre alternative instruments, and setting texts in hilarious ways. The whole PDQ Bach phenomenon is a satirical stab at pompous, judgmental musicologists, a class of intellectual who came to the forefront of mid-twentieth century musical criticism. Pointed as they are at such a rarified field of study, Schickele's jokes can at times seem a bit too obscure to the layperson, but then the orchestra starts playing, the soprano warbles out another twisted aria, and they're all back in the palm of his hand.   Apart from his mission of getting the musical intelligentsia...

Chances are very good that the only thing you know by Carl Orff is Carmina Burana. Carmina is a suite of songs for chorus and soloist based on poetry by medieval defrocked monks. It's lusty music, full of pounding rhythms and grunting voices, collectively evoking a post-Christian bacchanale. The most famous piece from the suite is "O Fortuna," a hymn to chaos that begins and ends the work, and which has provided background music for many a depiction of apocalyptic warfare. As a whole, Carmina Burana is one of the most popular classical works composed in the twentieth century. Musically, it's schlock, but it's fun schlock. It's a shame that so few know anything else about Carl Orff, because it's far from his greatest contribution to music. That would be the Schulwerk. With the help of Gunild Keetman, Orff developed an approach to teaching music that puts children at the center of the learning experience. The Orff method is elemental, starting with...

Paul Simon slip-slid his way into my musical vocabulary right alongside gospel music. By the time I graduated from seminary, I had acquired the complete Simon & Garfunkel collection and was well on my way to a full set of Paul Simon's solo outings. With these influences in place, I was primed for the final revelation. In the summer of 1991, I returned to Oregon, and picked up a pile of cassettes from my brother Jon's garage sale. They sat in my car, unplayed, until one day a few months later I was driving between Medford and Talent, the two United Methodist churches that made up my first Oregon appointment. Things were not going well in Medford: I was constantly butting heads with my senior pastor; he was triangulating his anger at me through my wife, who was also on staff at Medford; and there were a number of extended family conflicts that were heating up. Add to this the loss of my best tension relief, running, due to my first attack of plantar fasciitis, and...

Gospel took me by surprise. When I first arrived in Dallas to enroll in seminary, my plan was to do a double major in sacred music and theology. For some reason, though, it had never occurred to me that it might be a good idea to check out the program I was going to be entering before I actually moved myself and most of my possessions into a dorm room. I'd gone to Illinois sight unseen, and that had worked out reasonably well, so why should I treat my seminary choice any differently? The answer, of course, is that I wasn't even in the program that led me to choose this school over any other Methodist seminary in the United States. I'd gotten into the Master of Divinity program without a hitch, but that was a course of study I could've taken anywhere else. If I wanted to earn a Master of Sacred Music, my choices were limited to SMU and Boston. Boston misplaced my application, so that left SMU. Just getting into the MDiv didn't mean I could be an MSM, as well; f...

Yeah, I hear your dismay, fellow music nerds: What the glockenspiel happened to Brahms? The answer is very simple: I just don't care for him. Blasphemy! Heresy! Tools of musicological excommunication, anathematization, shunning, and belittling are even now being leveled at my cretinous self. But if you can just bear with me for a few minutes, I hope you'll reconsider booting me from the Society of Musical Snobbery, because the case I'm arguing in this series is that taste, while it can be cultivated, is ultimately subjective. When last (a few hours ago, to be precise) we checked in with our erstwhile musical novice, he was about to embark on full apprenticeship in the musical arts. His institution of choice: Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in Salem, Oregon. I arrived at Willamette grossly unlettered in music literature. My exposure to the classics was limited to a few recitals I had yawned my way through (Van Cliburn--yes, that Van Cliburn--was ...