I must not have been thinking last spring when I made out the concert schedule for this school year that Memorial Day weekend was about the earliest it could ever be this year. So I put the Spring choir concert in it's normal spot–as late as possible in May, on the Sunday after the senior's last day. It was a couple of weeks ago that a couple of WLA parents caught the conflict with Memorial Day weekend (thank you Sehloffs!) and asked me about it.
With the Vajda Hymn Festival this weekend, I've been working on the program and looked ahead at remaining music dates for this school year, and I saw it again–I did put the Spring choir concert on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. What was I thinking???
So, to avoid any conflicts with both students and families wanting to get away that weekend, I've decided to move the concert date up one week to Sunday, May 17. The time is still the same (7:00 PM) and the location is too (WLA gym). What's on the program? Among other works that night, the Traveling Choir will be performing the music of Jackson Berkey that they will be singing at their 3rd invitation to sing at Carnegie Hall at 2:00 PM on June 14, 2009.
The choirs of Winnebago Lutheran Academy will be presenting a hymn festival on the sacred hymn texts of Jaroslav Vajda at 3:30 and 7:00 PM at Faith Lutheran Church, 55 Prairie Road, Fond du Lac, WI. (map)
Jaroslav Vajda passed from this life to eternal life on May 10, 2008 at the age of 89. His hymn texts, such as "Where Shepherds Lately Knelt" and "Go, My Children, with My Blessing", have become well known in the Wisconsin Synod ever since Christian Worship was published in 1993. With over 225 hymns texts and translations to his credit published in some 60 hymnals on five continents (all written after the age of 50!), Jaroslav Vajda was not only "the dean of hymn writers in North America" but was also a blessing of God to his Church throughout the world.
The following hymns will be performed by the WLA choirs:
A dinner will be served in between concerts in the Faith commons for anyone who wishes to eat. A freewill donation will be taken to assist Traveling Choir students who will be singing at Carnegie Hall on June 14, 2009.
One of the hymns that we will be singing on Sunday, March 29, 2009 for the 7th Annual WLA Hymn Festival will be "God of the Sparrow", text by Jaroslav J. Vajda and tune by Carl F. Schalk.
Have you ever struggled to understand what God's Word means, or what a hymn or song is getting at, and then something happens that you just get it? That happened for me a couple years ago when I heard the Koine version of the Irish hymn "This is My Will" (Christian Worship 497). Up until that time, I didn't really get how to "correctly" perform that hymn. Then I heard them perform it, both live and on one of their CDs (Gesangbuch), and the music and setting suddenly made sense.
Well, that just happened to me with "God of the Sparrow." Honestly, I have not understood two things about this hymn: (1) why does it keep asking questions that it doesn't answer, and (2) why has it become, according to statistics given by Carl Schalk to the 2002 WELS National Conference on Worship, Music, and the Arts, one of Vajda's most popular hymn texts?
I'm in the process of writing the program for the WLA Jaroslav Vajda Hymn Festival, and I Googled "God of the Sparrow" to speed up the process of retyping it into my program. This video was the first link on Google. I cried...many times. Now I understand a little bit better.
God of the sparrow God of the whale God of the swirling stars How does the creature say Awe How does the creature say Praise
God of the earthquake God of the storm God of the trumpet blast How does the creature cry Woe How does the creature cry Save
God of the rainbow God of the cross God of the empty grave How does the creature say Grace How does the creature say Thanks
God of the hungry God of the sick God of the prodigal How does the creature say Care How does the creature say Life
God of the neighbor God of the foe God of the pruning hook How does the creature say Love How does the creature say Peace
God of the ages God of the hand God of the loving heart How do your children say Joy How do your children say Home
Each school year, WLA music students participate in the Wisconsin State Music Association (WSMA) Solo Ensemble Festival. The Solo Ensemble festival gives music students an opportunity to prepare a piece of music (some students enter as many and ten different pieces!) to be judged by a state-trained music adjudicator with the possible opportunity of performing at a state festival or even being named exemplary soloist!. The Flyway Conference has the tradition of hosting the district festival on two consecutive Staurdays in March, alternating instrumental and vocal each year. Last year, WLA hosted the schools of the Flyway Conference for the district solo ensemble festival. This year that responsibilty went to Laconia High School.
March 7, 2009 was the instrumental weekend, March 14, 2009 was the vocal weekend, and piano players could perform on either day. Even though March 14 was the first day of spring break for WLA students, almost 50 WLA music students performed in 26 events on that day and 10 of those events were given a "starred-1st" (*1) rating, advancing them to the State WSMA Solo Ensemble Festival on April 25, 2009 at UW-Oshkosh. Congratulations to all the WLA students who performed on both weekends. I am very proud of all of you and how you used your God-given musical gifts!
Qualified for State (Class A - *1st place) *1 Haugly, Daniel 409A4 Music Theater-Male Role *1 Haugly, Daniel 404A4043 Tenor Solo *1 Plagenz, Peter 405A1 Bass Solo *1 Klein, Ben 404A15 Tenor Solo *1 Wilsmann, Tanya 201A6 Flute Solo *1 Wilsmann, Tanya 301A3016 Violin Solo *1 Academy Kids 981A210 Mixed Show Choir
*1 Leisses, Janeen 408A1 Music Theater-Female Role *1 Goltz, Kristen 402A4022 Alto Solo *1 Goltz, Kristen 408A6 Music Theater-Female Role *1 Moldenhauer, Daniel 306A16 Piano Solo *1 Scharf, Charis 306A40 Piano Solo *1 Breister, Adam 306A43 Piano Solo *1 Westphal, Seth 500A5002 Concert Snare Drum Solo *1 Kuhlow, Ashley 306A40 Piano Solo *1 Plagenz, et al 941.4A3 TTBB Quartet
Class A - 1st place 1 Leisses, Janeen 210A10 Eb Alto Saxophone Solo 1 Pankratz, Stephanie 402A15 Alto Solo 1 Gieschen, et al 930.6A1 SSA Double Trio 1 Orvis, Rochelle 402A12 Alto Solo 1 Boelk, Hether 401A12 Soprano Solo 1 Scharf, Charis 101A9 Trumpet Solo 1 Kerr, Marta 301a3012 Violin Solo 1 Pacetti, Paul 500A3 Concert Snare Drum Solo 1 Schmidt, et al 622A8 Trombone Duet, Euphonium Duet, or Trombone-Euphonium Duet
Class A - 2nd place 2 Koepsell, Caitlin 207A2071 Oboe Solo 2 Scharf, Charis 401A12 Soprano Solo 2 Scharf, Charis 408A8 Music Theater-Female Role 2 Leisses, Janeen 401A1 Soprano Solo 2 Boelk, et al 920A4 SS, SA, AA Duet 2 Sugars, Nick 500A5 Concert Snare Drum Solo 2 Westphal, Seth 510A4 Drum Set Solo 2 Pankratz, Stephanie 306A15 Piano Solo
Class A - 3rd place 3 Wright, Mikayla 401A1 Soprano Solo
Class B - 1st place 1 Weiglein, Amberly 201B2 Flute Solo 1 Coleman, Kailee 203B6 Bb Clarinet Solo 1 Olesen, Hannah 306B12 Piano Solo 1 Thiesfeldt, Rachel 306B26 Piano Solo 1 Cutter, Merissa 306B29 Piano Solo 1 Schuppe, Shelby 306B29 Piano Solo 1 Marchant, Patrick 306B9 Piano Solo 1 Dabringer, Joseph 504B6 Marimba or Xylophone Solo
Class B - 2nd place 2 Scharf, et al 1083B6 Jazz Improvisation Combo 2 Pacetti, Paul 504B3 Marimba or Xylophone Solo 2 Pacetti, Paul 510B4 Drum Set Solo
Class C - 1st place 1 Herrewig, et al 920CT SS, SA, AA Duet 1 Krug, Jim 404C2 Tenor Solo 1 Trapp, et al 920CT SS, SA, AA Duet 1 Schmidt, Hannah 402C7 Alto Solo 1 Cutter, et al 920C7 SS, SA, AA Duet 1 Cedarquist, Bryce 101C3 Trumpet Solo 1 Bock, Katie 201C1 Flute Solo 1 Bock, Theresa 210C2 Eb Alto Saxophone Solo 1 Kapellen, Megan 306C12 Piano Solo 1 Newhauser, et al 922CT ST, SB, AT, AB Duet 1 Meyer, Becky 401C6 Soprano Solo
Class C - 2nd place 2 Reehl, et al 930.3C8 SSA Trio
The WLA Traveling Choir travels to its newest association congregation (and farthest south), Trinity, Hartford (aka Huilsberg) on Sunday, Mar. 1, 2009. Trinity is south of Hwy 33 (and NW of Hartford) on the corner of Cty S and Goodland Rd. There is one service at 10 AM.
You know all those little cross references in between the columns of your Bible? Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild made a data set which visualizes all 63, 779 cross references in the King James Version of the Bible. Each arc represents one cross reference. The color of the arc is dependent on the proximity of the cross reference. The alternating white and grey bars across the bottom are the 66 books of the Bible and the length of the vertical lines in the books are the number of verses per chapter. The image won an honorable mention for illustrations in the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
I have written on topic of "The Power of Music" three times before: (1, 2, 3). I am always interested in what other people have to say about the power of music in their lives and when I read this "Inspirational Speech on Music" last week I couldn't get through it without getting choked up. I record it here to save it for the future and to someday comment more to it.
"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I mightbe more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores." On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.
One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.
He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."
On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.
At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we cannot with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.
I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.
I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's [Piano] Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"
Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldierand help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a fewdays from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."
