Month: January 2014

We have some splendid pieces on our spring program. There’s the Mozart Requiem, Randall Thompson’s The Last Invocation (which I wrote about in my singing book!) and The Beatitudes by Arvo Part.

And then there’s the Psalm 90 by Charles Ives. We ran through it for the first time last night. I don’t know. It’s beautiful in the last few minutes of the piece, but everything leading up to it?

I trust John Maclay’s judgement though (he’s the director of the Choral Society of Grace Church). Also, I love this one line of instruction that Ives wrote to the singers, about the feeling he’d like to elicit (presumably): “As evolution, quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally.”

Coincidentally, every time I walk to and from choir I pass by where Ives lived when he was first married (70 West 11th). For those who haven’t read my book, I have a section where I describe my walk to choir practice. Except, I see my description of his home was cut! It’s very unlike me to have left the Ives part out because one, he was a composer and two, he lived next door to a cemetery (the Second Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue).

I was so sure it was going to turn out that Ives had written Psalm 90 while living there, inspired by the cemetery. But he lived there from 1908 to 1911, and John’s notes say Psalm 90 was written in 1894 and 1902, and revised in 1923-1924.

I took some pictures. My camera isn’t so great with night shots, but that works well when shooting a cemetery, it turns out.

The cemetery is marked with the dates “1805 to 1829” and has twenty-five graves that I can count. I wonder if there’s anyone left alive who still visits the grave of an ancestor here? Here are some of the people who are buried there (most of the remains were removed when the cemetery was reduced to build 11th Street). Oh, here is more information about the cemetery and few more names of those buried there. Victims of yellow fever and malaria were buried there initially.

Ives was also an insurance executive, and his firm, Ives & Myrick, used to be at 38 Nassau Street. I just looked, and there’s a new-ish building there now, alas.

PS: As we went through Psalm 90, there were a few spots where I heard the music from the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, the one with Alastair Sims. The composer for that score was Richard Addinsell. I wonder if he was influenced by Ives.

A lot of people repeat this quote from Ives’s wife Harmony, saying that the Psalm 90 was “the only one of his works that satisfied him.” But I have been unable to find the source of that quote.

Another cemetery shot. I have to see if it is ever opened for visitors.

Sorry, I haven’t posted because I’ve been distracted. If you missed the pilot, find Enlisted on On Demand and watch it. You’re welcome.

A leftover photograph from last Halloween. Clowns. Shudder. Even tiny, itty bitty clowns (in a coffin) are scary.

Every day I get email about my book, or new reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, or elsewhere, and the feedback has been amazing. Even people who had trouble with parts of my book, like my agnosticism, still have wonderful things to say about the rest of it.

For the record though, the thread about my agnosticism was meant to show that, in the end, the state of my beliefs doesn’t matter. Group singing, and great music, and sacred music, cuts through all of that and unites people of different faiths, or no faith at all. It addresses needs that we all share, and highlights the best in everyone. I am nothing but grateful to the faith that has inspired such important work. I wish that I had done a better job at communicating that.

Thank you everyone for all that you say. You will never know how much it means to me. We all have fears, regrets, disappointments, but thanks to all of you I can look at your words and think I contributed something of value.

The prism light hits the sleeping, taking-a-break-from-general-rampaging, Bleecker.

I love when people come across old posts of mine and comment on them or email me about them.

Years ago I posted about this sad sign on Bleecker street. Almost seven years later someone saw it, filled me in on the background of the person named in the sign, and gave me permission to include his email in my post. It was just so great to have that information, to have that glimpse into the life of the person who inspired the sign. And to have my brief post expand like that. It’s like the comments section on my post about Elsie’s Oke Doke Bar.

All of this made me think of the 11th Street Paddington Bear. He sits in an apartment window in the Village, his outfits regularly changing with the seasons. I’d been passing by that bear on my way to and from choir rehearsal for 30 years when I wrote about him in Imperfect Harmony. Then, in early 2012, I walked by and saw this enormously sad sign. The person responsible for the bear, Norma Langworthy, had died.

The bear is still there, though. Someone, her children perhaps, have kept him in the window, and they now change his outfits. A woman who’d read my book tried using Google street view to see him, but it didn’t quite work. So I walked by and took this picture. I’m glad to still see him and I appreciate the effort, but the apartment is empty. I know I’m insane, but I felt bad for the bear, who is now all alone.

I will have more to say later about One Simple Idea, I only just started reading it, but I went to a reading last night and it was PACKED. These pictures don’t really capture it. It was standing room only and people filled the aisles. The first picture is only a small piece of the left side of The Corner Bookstore.

The subtitle of the book is, How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. I am the perfect audience for this book. For all my grousing I have always embraced the positive view (every day I write down three things that made me happy, no matter how small my pleasures might be on any one day, ie, “my plants are still alive.”). But I can’t stand when positive thinking glosses over the horrible, or offers aphorisms like, “Everything happens for a reason.” God, I hate that phrase.

In the beginning of the book Horowitz promises to frankly assess the movement. He will criticize what needs to be criticized, and offer a vision for the future of positive thinking. I’m there. The first two chapters made me feel good and I don’t think that was even the point.

A look back into the bookstore, as I was leaving. It was a nice audience. Mitch Horowitz has lovely friends and associates. Oh, and the back room was filled with their children, who were quietly reading books grabbed from the shelves.