Contents:

Study With Alice Parker

Reflections

Editorial

Board's Eye View

The View From Here

From The Mailbox

Looking For Music?

Spirituals In New York

Home Page
The News Stand

Study with Alice Parker
Melodious Accord Fellowship Programs

Three programs are offered annually at Alice's home in western Massachusetts. The participants live together nearby, and meet daily in Alice's studio to discuss matters of common interest. Nestled at the edge of a state forest, four miles from the nearest town, Singing Brook Farm offers a comfortable and ideal retreat from the pressures of professional life. Come and refresh your spirit with a new look at the materials of music and how they relate to your own work and your community.

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Reflections
from Fellowships and Workshops

The week of study with Alice Parker opened my eyes to a deeper spirit of song, found in melody and group singing. My own work in a church challenges me to face the crisis of congregational song becoming replaced with vicarious worship through entertainment. Through Alice's wealth of knowledge and melodic sensibilities I sensed a door opening for me, back into the deeply spiritual world of communal music making in which the tests of belief, story and soul cry are embodied in melody and the moment of creating sound. .... I am a searching musician and minister, searching for a reason and hope to go on in music ministry in the face of huge cultural forces. I found the beginning of new direction and purpose through Alice's teaching and trust in people, through her smiling grace and confidence in good melody, through her life of service and hospitality. What a refreshing and life changing week!

Brad Jones

You focus folks on true worship, the intersection of individual congregation members' voices, the tune, and the word. It is not pulling God in, but rather, finding him right there within.

...It was pretty funny that we began your sessions singing like a bunch of choir directors cut loose, then ended up floating the songs out. Our own congregation members will feel so much more welcome to sing if singing does not mean imitating a 30 rank pipe organ.

Jim Edgar

I think I had seen the element of craft as pretty much discreet from the more murky notions of inspiration and imagination. What I discovered...is that the craft has the capability of unlocking the imagination. As one thinks about how to respond to the melody, ideas jump out onto the stage: they are not hiding out in deepest space trying to elude. I always believed that imagination needed to precede craft. I now see that they really do proceed in tandem: one provides the raw material for the other and the energy flows back and forth.

David Poole

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Editorial
Artistic Ownership?

There is much discussion these days about unauthorized copying of music and pictures off the web. Creators are losing legitimate income from their creations, and big distributors are losing their profit margins. They might even have to go out of business!

What is a copyright? It's a legal term that limits the right to make a copy of an artistic creation - literally 'the right to copy' such a work. It made a lot of sense back in the days when if you wanted a copy, you had to transcribe it yourself, by hand. I'm reminded of the story of a New York musician whose first job was to copy the violin parts for the 12th stand in the Roxy Theater in Manhattan. Imagine the scene: the score arrives for a new show. The head copyist gets it first, for the first stand. Others get it in turn. They have their own stands because each copyist's 'hand' is different - each player gets used to one set of idiosyncracies... Think how many people were employed in this industry, in the pre-Xerox days.

Remember, too, the stories of Bach and many other composers who sat up all night copying a score they'd borrowed, so that they could learn from it. And there is a wonderful kind of ownership that results from making a fair copy: you've retraced the composer's thinking, and noted each detail of placement and articulation. Even Toscanini used this method for studying a new score...

The first blow to individual ownership was dealt by the invention of the printing press. All of a sudden it was possible to make a number of copies...which still had to be bound and stored and then purchased. As that technology advanced, over the centuries, books and music became more and more widely distributed - and the copyright law developed and kept up with those ever-larger circles. The end of that particular cycle came with the individual copier, when the machine moved into the home and replaced the stencils of the purple-ink and ditto machines. (Oh, do I remember the frustrations of making those masters, which only lasted for 50 or so copies!) For me as a composer, it was and still is a boon. I can make an immediate copy of a manuscript - I can cut and paste it to suit my needs - even print my own score paper. But the first years that home copies came into existence, my income from royalties fell by over half. The system was cracking.

The final blow to copyright as we have known it has come with the electronic revolution. How can we limit ownership when material is broadcast by electrical impulses? Computers, CDs, Videos - in these manifestations, there's no such thing as an 'original' - the copies are equally effective. And there's no limit to the number of times they can be reproduced - the copies don't get fainter and fainter. No wonder the industry is in an uproar.

Let's go back to the real problem. What is 'ownership' of an artistic creation? If it's in the visual arts, there is an 'original' - a thing which can be touched, framed, displayed, and of which 'copies' can be made by hand or by camera. If it's music, though, created on the computer or in the recording studio, where is the 'original'? The creator can more-or-less 'prove' that it's his or her work - but even this gets difficult when proof is to be determined by a jury. . . that is, when someone else challenges that assertion. Unless the creator has dated and saved all the steps of the process - that is, printed out or kept the tapes of every draft of the work-in-progress - the working-out of the piece has vanished into the electronic dust-bin signified by the 'delete' button.

So, what is 'original'? I love the paradox of its current meaning, which seems to signify that what-ever-it-is has no roots in the past. What has happened to the noun 'origins' - that which is precisely beholden to the past? The word root (as cited in one of my favorite reference books, Origins, by Eric Partridge, Macmillan, NY, 1958) is first from the Latin 'oriri' (arise, as the sun), and thence to 'origo' (source, as a spring). So we're back to first causes. Do music and literature and all the arts arise here, with the first springs of human creativity? Those of us with a theological bent would certainly say so - and therein lies the crux of the problem. Because the whole idea of limiting the distribution of artistic creations is a legal concept - and we're trying to fit it to a theological idea. Can we 'own' even our own creations? Can we 'own' land or water or a thought? Or are they rather immediate presences derived from our ancestors and held by us in trust for our descendants, ever changing, ever the same...

I am one of a number of artists who describe the moment of inspiration as an interior welling-up of powers not previously suspected. We become vessels for something outside of ourselves, and far larger than ourselves. Here the parallel to a spring is exact: we cannot summon it at will, or create water that isn't there. It all comes from a deep, mysterious source that our science can try to explain, but cannot create. So, in a real way, my music isn't mine any more than my children are mine: neither is my 'possession'. My craft is the way I channel that inspiration. My principal reward is in crafting a work which comes close to (never meeting) my own vision. The next step is performance: the way I begin to understand this creation which is now separate from me. The business of distribution is the last, most expensive and least controllable, process.

How times have changed in the last 150 years! Now, just when proving ownership of a work is a legal necessity, technology has provided us with machines that make its dissemination almost impossible to control. Is there any solution? The only somewhat viable suggestion I've heard is for some kind of universal licensing. All these 'creations' would be available from a huge central computer (shades of '1984'), available for reuse only on the payment of a fee. From the proceeds, 'royalties' would be distributed to 'creators'. (Of course, the next question is "Who determines the percentages and amounts?" I can only be certain that the amount getting back to the creator will never be more than the current 10% -- there will always, even in the cyberworld, be middlemen.)

The collision course is between the artist who would rather see work performed and enjoyed, and the business which exists to make money from these creations. Make no mistake about it: the discussion of copyright has to do with money, not art. As long as we live in a culture which places more value on money, this uncomfortable conflict will endure.

Alice Parker

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Board's Eye View

The September meeting of the Melodious Accord Board is the highlight of our business year. It's a time for looking back at the achievements of the old year, evaluating our financial status, and planning for the new year. There was much good news to share: My Love and I is listed as a "Best Seller" in the Gothic catalog, Alice Parker's Hand-me-down Songs is in the hands of a publisher, and we expect our recording, Listen, Lord, with Alice's wonderful cantata of that name and a collection of previously unrecorded spirituals, to be released in January. We took time to acknowledge the hard-working Board members who have been involved in these projects. We also registered our gratitude to all our loyal supporters who have made it possible for us to move forward with The Alice Parker Recording Project and our other activities. If you were among those who responded to our summer appeal, special thanks.

Marilyn Pryor

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The View From Here

The equinoctial storms come quickly. There's a quickening in the heavy air, leaves turn in the advancing wind, and a roar signifies the drum of rain coming down the valley. The first significant leaf-fall turns roads into yellow and brown, slippery, spatter-patterns. The crowns of the trees lean impossibly in sequential waves. Twigs and branches litter the lawn, and a crash back in the woods tells of an old maple down. The rain drives horizontally against the windows; the wind batters the walls and shakes the timbers. Nature is unleashed, and I exult in the raw power.

We learn, over the years, ways to prepare for and cope with these storms. Flashlights, candles and matches stand ready, oil lamps are filled, the battery radio is at hand. There are stores of water in kitchen and bathrooms - if I've had time, I've filled the tub against the power loss that would deny us the services of the pump. The porch furniture is battened down, and doors tightly latched. Kindling and logs are stacked by the wood stove. I'm glad, once again, for a gas cooking-stove. Did I remember to close up the car? Should I unplug the computer?

When the power goes, there's a silence in the house. I'm cast back into childhood, enjoying the rituals of providing light, heat, a cup of tea. Does the phone still work? Amazingly often, it does, and I report to the power company and check out my older neighbors. Where's the break in the line? The last time, it was a large, dead tree that fell right across the road a quarter-mile north of my house, taking all the wires with it. By the time I got there the power company was already at work with chain saws, but I had to drive four miles around the block to take some water to unwary guests. We know never to flush, or touch the faucets, and to open the fridge as little as possible -- but do our tenants? And when the power returns, there's a sigh compounded of relief and regret - we must return to the present day. And reset all those electronic clocks!

The next day is usually impossibly clear and bright, with a champagne 'fizz' in the air. The brook is roaring rather than singing: I must cross the road and look at it churning over the rocks that usually divide it. I pick up sticks in the drive and set them out to dry: kindling for the next storm, nature's bounty from combing the woods. Then I drive to our dam, to watch the water that usually trickles over one spillway now surging over three, more than a foot deep. All the way to town the Chickley River is unfamiliarly wide and turbulent, swirling brown from all the soil it's dislodged. It's not so easy to check on the Deerfield River: it's all flood controlled. But one of my favorite haunts is Salmon Falls in Shelburne Falls, where the river makes a left hand turn, spilling over the power company's wooden restraints onto huge rocks below, marked by potholes, sliding paths worn smooth by centuries, and even dinosaur tracks. This was a spot sacred to the local Native Americans, and it's not difficult to recapture the awe felt by those who worshiped the elemental forces of nature. I join with them in saluting the mystery - and in picking up the threads of daily life again, after the storm.

Alice Parker

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From The Mailbox

"The International Language"

We have had swarms of children wanting to join the choir.... One small boy came in with both adoring parents at his side. They are Chinese. He has been here for just two weeks and knew no English. He had been in a children's choir in China and was wearing his choir t-shirt. Being unable to communicate directions to him in English, I simply sang a phrase, nodded and he repeated, a most glorious clear sound right on up to B flat, as "boy sopranish" as I have ever heard. I then pointed to a rhythmic exercise asking him to clap. He executed this perfectly. I then pointed to a four measure sightsinging exercise, sang his starting note on "oo" and off he went, sightsinging the tune accurately and sweetly. I then asked his father to please ask the boy to sing a Chinese song from his choir. He lit up, and sang with great gusto, a perfectly wonderful Chinese folk song. His parents said he has some Chinese songs with him that they will show me. I am excited about having him teach us a song. His entire face glowed. The style was brassy and rather nasal; vibrant. Nothing like the flutey quality he had performed earlier. What a pleasant surprise for me to have this child walk into the church basement...

Sally H. Dean

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Looking For Music?

We've been asked about where to get the music featured on our recent recording, My Love and I®. Some of these Alice Parker or Alice Parker and Robert Shaw arrangements are currently available through your music dealer, others are out of print but permission to copy may be obtained from Warner Bros. Publications, while the new TTBB arrangements are available from the Alice Parker Music Company. The following list should help you find your favorites or a new arrangement for your choir.

Currently in Print: available through your music dealer