Meditation: Many lives, one man

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’m already a day behind, but it’s okay because I’ve cheated with the timestamp.

Part of my condescending irritation with the little book I’m using to generate topics for this series is its wide-eyed naivete about its essays. None of them are revelatory in the least. I mean, “many lives, one man”? Who hasn’t realized that he’s more than one person, at least anyone over the age of thirteen?

However, I’ll be bold and agree with the main point of the essay and say we’re not talking the external roles we play. Yes, I’m a husband, a father, a teacher, a friend, but that’s not what we’re confessing here. Within us we harbor more than one actual person.

To begin with, I am a sensualist, which should shock no one who knows me. (Well of course, some would say, you’re a Taurus.) I seek delight for all of my senses. Pretty things enchant me. Well-prepared food is a constant goal. Silk, cotton, skin, against my skin. The sight of a beautiful human body, male or female. Music of almost any kind. Well-designed type. Shakespeare’s language. Wooden boxes.

I am a creator. I seek to make the thing that is not, whether it’s music or a blog post or supper or a new lesson plan. I look at the chaos that the universe presents and I organize it into something new. With any luck, and years of experience, the new thing is something coherent.

I am a leader. It’s hard to write that. I don’t know why, other than I have taken hits in the past from those who resent my ability to lead. But even though modesty does not permit one to brag, I have to recognize that I have an almost magnetic leadership ability. As the years have progressed, my leadership has become more and more what I call “permission giving,” in that I simply make the decisions that allow others to come together to accomplish things. Yes, Coriolanus and the Lichtenbergians are good examples of that.

Now I am thinking very hard and trying to come up with other personae, but I’m drawing a blank. Warrior? Not so much. Fool? Not the same as a wit, I hope. Lover? See sensualist. Wanderer? I am not, as evidenced by my entire life. “Wounded man,” as Quiet strength concludes in its maudlin fashion? Pshaw. The hurts I have received in my life are as nothing and do not hamper my other selves. (‘Tis but a flesh wound.) I don’t think that’s braggadocio, truly, but then perhaps I am not an analyst, either.

Meditation: Being a Man

Posted on by Dale

I know, I know. Right off the bat we have a vomit-inducing title. Bear with me.

First a few words of introduction. Having decided that this blog sucks, I’m going to punish everyone by embarking on another year-round project. I will still write about music and theatre and other life concerns, but my daily impetus for writing will be A quiet strength: meditations on the masculine soul , by various authors, including one named, I kid you not, Shepherd Bliss.

Why I am in the possession of such an Iron John-y book, I cannot now remember. I must have been in search of something. Remember that I also have Affirmations for artists, and at some point I used to have some kind of daily taoist stuff too. I don’t think I ever read any of them straight through.

So what am I doing now? Am I seriously going to take up the meditations of this little gem and issue a sermon every day on what it means/takes/hurts to “be a man.” Who knows? I’m just going to write every day and see what we get.

Excelsior!

blogding

“Being a man.” What does it mean to “be a man”? This is always posed as if it were a Big Question, and the very posing leaves those of us who are if nothing else male feeling inadequate because we don’t in fact know the answer.

Shouldn’t we know the answer? On the one hand, we should know the answer because we are men, yes? On the other hand, what if we don’t know the answer? What if we are something less than men because somehow we have never measured up? Our failure is painful and secret.

Many years ago, at GHP, one of our CommArts teachers, Errol, arrived in Valdosta with a raging sinus infection that landed him in the hospital the Sunday the students arrived. On Monday night, I was asked to take over his classes for the week.

One of the classes was on Faulkner, and that was a piece of cake. I took a mythopoetic approach to the bits we read, and the kids ate it up.

His other class, though, was Hemingway, and I didn’t really know a lot about him as an author. But I plunged right in and took Hemingway’s manly manliness by the horns by posing the question to my students, what does it take to be a man?

All week we both read Hemingway and researched gender roles in the library, leading up to our final discussion. I asked the class to generate a list of attributes of manhood, and since they were GHP students, they suggested that the girls and boys generate separate lists and then we could compare.

The two lists were nearly identical, of course, and about two-thirds of the way through, as I was writing the attributes on the board, one of the girls pointed out that there was nothing on either list that was not simply part of being a sane, productive adult of either sex. So said we all. We never did untangle what old Ernest was on about, although we suspected it had something to do with causing oneself pain. And liking it.

Perhaps we may discover more in the coming year.

At the beach

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Here we are at the beach. Ahhhhhh…..

We’ve been looking for reading sunglasses but have been so far unsuccessful. Meanwhile, there’s a brand of boogie board the name of which has appealed to me. So until further notice, my nickname shall be “Slick Lizard.”

Announcement

Posted on by Dale

I officially declare this blog to be boring.

Where is the wit, the observation, the soul-bearing? Feh. It is to laugh.

So I’m thinking to myself, what I need is a new project. This would be in addition to Coriolanus over at lacunagroup.org, and in addition to prepping William Blake’s Inn for UGA. After all, those only take me through October, right?

I have before me two books. One is A quiet strength: meditations on the masculine soul. The other is Affirmations for artists. Never mind why I have them, I just have them.

So I think what I need to do is to discipline myself to write every day, to open one of these books and to respond to the topic on the first page and work my way through the book. I wouldn’t necessarily respond to the actual meditation, mind you, because they’re pretty lame, but perhaps I can do better with the material.

The Quiet strength book is actually daily meditations, so that would last an entire year. The Affirmations book is only 200 or so terms in alphabetical order, so that would only take me through next spring.

What is the sense of the assembly?

Things that make me sad

Posted on by Dale

The end of GHP is always heartbreaking. Even though I’ve done it for 24 years, it’s still the first time for each year’s group of students and the loss is devastating to them. It gets to me every year.

Things that make me sad:

  • just watching the kids the last few days, in the dining hall, across the campus, in their classes
  • the last afternoon, with all the kids going back to the dorms to pack
  • the final performances, especially Friday night’s Prism concert
  • Saturday morning’s Convocation, with students breaking down all around me because the loss is too much to bear
  • the absolute emptiness of campus after they’re gone
  • saying goodbye to my staff, knowing that I may never see some of my best friends again because they may not be returning next summer
  • packing up all the faculty dorm stuff, and packing up my stuff to go home
  • in doing that, unclipping all the minors registration forms that I save from the first week; I’m putting them into a box to take them to school to print on the backs of, all year, and they represent students who are still fresh in my memory
  • remembering the intensity of the entire experience, and despairing that “real life” is not like that

I’m tired.

Posted on by Dale

It’s the last week of GHP, and boy are my arms tired. This place will wear you out, both physically and emotionally.

Remember this list?

  • Write two or three more songs for Day in the Moonlight.
  • Revamp “Sir Christémas” to include tabor and crotales along with organ.
  • Revamp my old handbell arrangment of “Come, Jeannette, Isabela” for the Welcome Christmas competition. It dawned on me to try to reverse the instrumentation: rather than handbell choir and soprano solo, turn the handbells into wordless voices and the soprano into French horn, the required accompaniment this year. It could work.
  • Take another look at IV. Lento. Since my work with Craig, I’ve actually had a couple of insights. So far it’s all mental. Let’s see if I can turn them into reality.
  • Take a poke at my suite for double bass.

Let’s see what I accomplished during the last five weeks. I poked at the double bass suite, knocking out a trivial Fanfare without an ending. (I also got the first 20 measures of the Trio for Piano, Trombone, and Alto Sax written, but that’s a bonus. And I’m almost finished with the two-piano arrangement of “Milky Way.”)

That’s it. That’s all I’ve managed to do. And you will have noticed that I certainly haven’t blogged this summer, unlike last summer when I was in the final throes of my 365 project. It’s been an odd summer.

It hasn’t been a bad summer by any means. The kids have been sweet and productive, the faculty has been great, and even VSU hasn’t been too unsupportive. There have been some amazing moments: the foreign language Cabaret, the choral concert, a couple of the chamber pieces. The kids attending my period dance seminars have been eager and adept. I’ve had friends around me. I’ve lost anywhere from seven to nine pounds, depending on the day.

But on the creative front, it’s been a bust. I don’t know why I’m going through such a dry spell. Part of it is time and energy: at 1:30 in the afternoon, I somehow can’t manage to get my brain to kick in to produce anything. I’m a morning person, or a late night person.

I am excited about the future. The Lichtenbergian/Lacunians are kicking around an all-male production of Coriolanus, and that’s the first script I’ve been eager to do in years. I’ve also discovered, via Jobie, a new way of doing theatre that I’m excited about sharing and exploring once I get back home.

I also think that once I’m back home and settled in, all the creativity/work involved in getting Coriolanus on the boards will jumpstart all my other projects. The two choral works are due in August, so I’ll have a deadline to work against. All this is to the good.

This is completely rambling. Sorry about that. It’s been that kind of summer.

UPDATE: At breakfast just now, one of the students came up to the table and asked one of the teachers to take a picture of him with me. A gentle reminder from the universe that you don’t always get to assign the meaning to your life.

A little work

Posted on by Dale

I sent the unfinished “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba” to be looked over by the musicians. I had an ending to it, but it was silly, so I lopped it off before sending the rest of it.

I’ve been working on a two-piano arrangement of “Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way,” or as the Lacuna chorus always referred to it, “Ah, Number 10…” My reasons for doing so? It’s a beautiful piece, and it’s not going to get performed any time soon with the orchestral accompaniment, and the original “piano score” was actually a sketch using a piano voicing but is way too spread out to be played by two hands. Two pianos can actually cover all the notes, plus the ones I added when I orchestrated it. One piano would be easier to convince someone to do, but I’m sticking with two for the moment.

Anyway, that’s been going well, and it’s not hard. I just duplicated the piano part, and all I’ve had to do is go back and delete some notes, double other notes, and revoice some of it.

And today, I actually made myself do some abortive sketches for Maila’s Trio. Ironically, I went back to read the Lichtenbergian Assignment featuring the nonexistent work to get some ideas for it.

Here’s the fragment I got done today. It’s kind of nice, I think. Where the trombone is going to fit in, God only knows.

More double bass!

Posted on by Dale

In accordance with the Lyles Policy Towards Double Bass Music (that would be Grayson, and “more of it” pretty much sums it up), I have worked this morning on “Fanfare for Double Bass Duo & Marimba.”

You may recall that last summer I wrote “Dance for Double Bass Duo & Marimba,” and it was well-received. And you may also recall that I have posited creating companion pieces for it, i.e., “Fanfare” and “Threnody.” That’s what I’m working on this morning. To be realistic, if I wanted it played this summer, I’d need to finish it this morning. There are only three weeks left in the program.

However, I’m taking a break. We’ll see if I get back to it today.

One of VSU’s cataloging librarians stopped me during preplanning and asked for a second copy of the score and parts to “Dance.” I had given copies to the GHP collection last summer, and had cataloged it for them for good measure. This particular librarian worked for GHP a couple of summers and is a nice guy; he wanted a copy for VSU’s collection, although both copies are shelved in the same place. You can see for yourself by going to the Odum Library catalog and looking up “Dale Lyles.” For kicks, look at the full display.

Anyway, that was gratifying.

What’s going on in Pan-Dimensional Mouse Land? I am, curiously, more often than not feeling that I am only a bit in this dimension. I am not disconnected, mind you, but I do feel more as if I were in more places than this, dabbling in the running of this program in one dimension while doing… something else?… elsewhere. If that makes any sense.

This is the All-Campus Chorus weekend, and we’ll be doing Fauré’s Requiem this afternoon. It should be quite lovely; the chorus is first-rate and practically had it ready for performance the first rehearsal on Friday night. (Half the chorus is made up of vocal majors and minors, but the other half just showed up Friday night to sing this weekend.) Pronunciation of the Latin has been a non-issue; notes have been almost perfect; even phrasing has been easy. That’s fun.

The strings/orchestra are really good again this year. The strings will handle the first half of the concert on their own, with Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, which is a pretty piece; and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which is one of the most sumptuous pieces ever written. Given how well the strings knocked out the Holst St. Paul Suite last Thursday, it should be most satisfying.

I got to teach some Shakespearean nuts and bolts to Amy Cain’s theatre majors for the last three days, about an hour each day. We covered how to disentangle all those words by using our English grammar skills: find the root sentence, and then figure out the vocal arc of that. Then start adding all those clauses and phrases and lists and appositives back in, always maintaining the arc of the root sentence.

We glanced at Lessac-ian issues of vowels and consonants and airstream. We looked at how you could explore opposing emotional impulses using the same text. We worshipped at the altar of Maggie Smith, who is after all a goddess. I had a great time.

I’ve been wearing my Utilikilt since last week, a couple of days a week, and it no longer attracts attention, except for the random kid (usually a boy) who feels compelled to affirm my rad-ness.

Jobie’s been showing Lord of the Rings in the lobby of the dorm on Saturday nights. We’ve been having a good time with that, admiring the movies while taking potshots at them. A never-ending source of debate, given the jumble of genders and sexualities present in the lobby at any given time, is who’s hot and who’s meh.

Three weeks down, three weeks to go.

Not exactly encouraging

Posted on by Dale

From today’s Composers Datebook:

In the Guinness Book of World Records, the record for the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is held by the “Gothic Symphony “of the British composer Havergal Brian.

This Symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until some 40 years later, on June 24th in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster.

Brian was born in 1876, to working class parents, and despite his talent and the encouragement of his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, and the leading German composer of his day, Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his “Gothic” Symphony, Brian’s musical career never caught hold. Perhaps it was class discrimination, or simply poverty resulting from the personal disruption of two marriages and several children.

Whatever the reason, for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity. With the deaths of Elgar and Bantock, Brian lost what little collegial support he had. Only late in his life did his work start to attract attention, when composer and BBC music producer, Robert Simpson, discovered his music and arranged for some performances.

By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and Brian died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.

There it is. I actually acquired the “Gothic” years ago. It is a huge, sprawling, messy, glorious affair.

Fool’s errand

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I have been enjoying myself immensely creating ein Spaß for the campus, which I’ve chosen to call the Fool’s Errand. I have stolen wholesale the concept of Improv Everywhere‘s mp3 experiments, and almost wholesale the script and structure of their fourth endeavor, adapting it for the VSU campus and the GHP mindset.

The idea, for those of you who have not seen IE’s video, is for people to download an mp3 to their player, not listen to it, and then show up at the appointed time and place. Upon a signal, they begin to play the mp3 and to follow the directions from Steve, the omnipotent voice from above.

What follows is gentle silliness, the madness of crowds, and all-round street theatre. They follow a leader (Jobie in a fool’s hat), play a “fun game” on the pedestrian walk using the bricked streetscape, gather on West Lawn, take photos, do the “human dart board” thing, play freeze tag, and then suffer a ridiculous relaxation exercise from Kevin, Steve’s eternally annoying sidekick.

It’s been a lot of fun studying the original IE experiment, walking out the structure of it on our campus, making some creative changes, and finally writing the script and producing the mp3. In doing so, I’ve learned how to use GarageBand, Apple’s sound machine software. Very cool. I had started to use Logic Express, their consumer-level pro sound software, but GarageBand was a lot easier to deal with and accomplished exactly what I needed to do. Logic can wait till later.

Just now, as I went to transmogrify the .m4a file that GarageBand saves to disk into an .mp3 file for general consumption, I discovered that I own a third pro sound software tool: Apple’s Soundtrack. I honestly didn’t know I had it. It must have been installed with Final Cut Express, the video editing software that I use a lot. It allows you to preview your video in a little window and create literally the soundtrack for that video. After you get the timing right (and it has all those little video timing things), then you import the soundtrack into your video file. Sounds right handy, if one’s main focus in life were doing that kind of thing.

Anyway, I was thinking I might score the Fool’s Errand myself, but clearly I was not thinking clearly. I had two pieces from my new age album, Stars on Snow, both the title work and a bagatelle called “Air Pudding,” but that wasn’t nearly enough, and I don’t know how I thought I was going to have the time actually to write 25 more minutes of music.

So I ended up using other people’s music, a nice melange of Ray Lynch, Tosca, and that fraud Constance Demby. I did use “Stars on Snow” as the relaxation bit.

It should be a lot of fun. I’m keeping my authorship a secret from the kids, so it will be fun to go and be a part of it and watch it unfold. I’ll post a report on how it went.