FROM THE BOARD

Meetings of the Melodious Accord Board of Trustees are always lively with discussions and brain-storming, and the recent meetings were particularly busy ones. Officers were elected: Marilyn Pryor, Chairman; Lewis White, Vice-Chairman; Kathleen Holt, Treasurer, and Dan Bergfeld, Secretary. Tina Mansfield, a founding member of Melodious Accord, who has served on the Board continuously since 1985, was honored with a Lifetime Membership.

The Board has been frustrated in its dealings with the standard record companies and, in hopes of being able to make our recordings available to you sooner, we have decided to produce our CDs independently. This is a new venture for us, but we are on our way with The Family Reunion and it should be on our shelves soon.

We will also be updating our web site, recognizing that there are many innovative features now available to better serve our needs and yours. This may take us some time to complete, so please be patient.

The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church parishioners and staff gave us a warm welcome as we returned for the annual Spirituals SING honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Led by Alice Parker and Pamela Warrick-Smith, the joyful and passionate singing of favorite spirituals by the attendees created a rich and resonant sound in the lovely chapel.

On the recording scene, we have just completed recording Alice's opera, Singers Glen which is based on the life of Joseph Funk, and includes wonderful arrangements of the shape-note hymns from his tune book Genuine Church Music. In a different vein, Jim Heiks is overseeing the recording of selected songs from Alice Parker's Hand-Me-Down Songs, with a chorus of children, a "Grandpa" and our own very experienced "Grandma," Alice.

Our thanks for your help in making all these exciting things possible.

Marilyn Pryor

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CONTEMPLATION AND CRAFT
Editorial

My attention was captured by a brief article by Christopher A. Dustin in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music Collegium Journal. Under the title "The Liturgy of Theory", he gave some etymology for these terms. Contemplation was originally the "beholding" as of a spectacle; and Craft was a way of making something visible: "not as the imposition of form on matter, but as an occasion for allowing order (or kosmos) to appear.

It struck me that this is very much what I strive for in my teaching. . . Not so much "doing" as "being". The composer is not so much telling the music where to go, as asking where it wants to go. The singer/hearer is not so much fitting the music into patterns, as becoming one with it, thus perceiving its inner energies and form. We tend, in this society, to think so much about what we are doing, that we can no longer just do it and enjoy the experience for what it is. We continually want to impose order.

I live in a house surrounded by natural forms. From every window I see trees. The one I'm facing at the moment shows the lower section of a hemlock tree that is perhaps 25 feet tall, with a trunk some 5 inches in diameter. The branches cluster closely off the trunk, with a profusion of short twigs - perhaps at 6 inch intervals - each of which branches out into fingers of needle-covered shoots. With my eyes narrowed, it becomes a gray-green blur of light and shade, of dark and silvery greens, of almost-white trunk and the black of inner shadows. >From a distance, it's a column of green; from 12 feet away, the trunk is obscured by the outer detail. I would despair of trying to draw it - there's just too much going on.

Perhaps this has become the way we see and listen today. We're so surrounded by detail that, as spectators, we are caught in it. We don't take time to "contemplate" that which is behind the outward show, the inner, ever-evolving structure. As creator-composers, we're caught in the details of style and technique: the outward "notes" rather than the inner "flow". We emulate the needles rather than becoming the bole, which feels the upsurge of sap into the center, and the balancing downfall of sun and rain on the outside. For a song or poem to live in our memories, the outer details must be the inevitable result of inner forces.

Which brings me to my other constant image: water. In spring, summer and fall here, there is the endless sound of the brook across the road - a light, high gurgle which deepens in rain and storm. (In winter, I can't hear it till I go outside. I miss it.) It's always falling down the gorge: ever-changing and ever the same. It's as impossible to draw as the hemlock. But its laws, too, are immutable: flowing around the stone and over the rock, splashing, bubbling, coming to rest in quiet pools. Or, not here but on the coast, the "endless rocking" of Whitman's cradle: the sea, each wave formed by deep currents, by earth's revolving, by tidal flows acted upon by winds and earthquakes.

We humans are part of this natural world. But we inhabitants of the western world are constantly trying to influence the flow from outside, from our limited perspective. We move almost unconsciously within these natural forces, so mired in outer detail that we forget about the inner laws which make life possible. Light, sound, gravity, energy; beginning, growing, flowering, fading, decaying back into the next beginning. We take the expedient action, worry about the bottom line, and trust in violence as a solution to human problems. Can we stop this acting-too-soon, and learn to take time to "contemplate" the "spectacle" around us? Can we begin to appreciate the "craft" which discloses order rather than imposing it.

Professor Dustin suggests that "the making of music "is" a form of human work that connects us, both as spectators and as practicing participants, with God's work. It is by letting kosmos appear that music performs its funda-mentally liturgical function." Amen. We don't have to be in church to recognize that God's work is the whole of creation. We long to be at rest in it, but don't stop our busyness long enough to look deeply, to listen, to taste, smell and touch.

Music can be an invaluable aid to such centering, such release from outward pressures and discovery of inner peace. Singing together can provide instant transcendence, restoring us to the balance of the natural world, and affirming our place in it. Both as artists and spectators we help each other to disclose the original kosmos.

Alice Parker

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FROM A SERMON

"On Friday evening of this week, this church was filled with more than 200 people who gathered simply to sing hymns together. It was an extraordinary and grace filled evening." Not all of us thought of ourselves as singers, and not all of us could read music. Yet here we were... Under the gentle tutelage of Alice Parker, we intoned medieval chants and renaissance rounds, "and songs" from the folk traditions of Appalachia and of Wales... All manner of voices surrounded me, singing with more confidence than we usually hear from these pews on a Sunday morning. . . Several times, as a hymn ended, the walls and floor and air all around us would hold the chord, continuing to sing it for seconds after our voices had become still. It was lovely.

I love to sing, but I don't read music and in the whole of my life I have never sung in a chorus or choir. But last Friday evening I learned something new... A strong conductor doesn't stifle creativity, but frees it. Half way through the SING on Friday, N. P. leaned over to me and said, "I didn't know I could sing this well." I had just been feeling exactly the same thing. I was finding notes that were beyond my range and hearing harmonies that I cannot even now describe.

As you gather around your Thanksgiving feast this week, let it be for you not only a family gathering, but a true eucharist, a marrying of heaven and earth... And may there be not just one note from all at your table, but rich harmonies in the song you sing together.

Preached by Bishop Martin Townsend at Trinity Church, Upperville, VA, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

It's been as strange a winter in Hawley as everywhere else this year. At the end of January there is just a little patchy snow on the ground - we've not had anything but occasional, rare dustings - not one real snowstorm. I remember the year I moved here, with a cord of firewood dumped outside ready to be stacked. It snowed at the end of October, and the stacking had to wait until spring. The next two years we were sledding in November, and had not-very-welcome storms on Easter Sundays. This year we looked for snow at Thanksgiving, at Christmas, at New Year's, and all this month and it still hasn't arrived. Maybe in April.

There have been people golfing on green fairways, playing roller hockey instead of ice, woodsmen working in March mud instead of hard winter snowbanks, buds on bushes and bulbs - even some flowers. The local restaurants and ski places are languishing - the usual flow of tourists that breathes economic life into the region is just not here.

But finally we have a cold snap - near zero for a bit, and since then in the teens and twenties. The ground is finally frozen, and I'm reminded of how much I'd forgotten: How the brook looks with white edges and caps on the rocks. How birds cluster around the feeders (and how quickly they empty them). How nice it is, after one of those dustings, to see even the cold sun melt the snow from stone walkways. How the full moon reflects blue light off of even lightly-covered fields, and how the trees cast long, blue shadows. How necessary and delightful the fire in the wood-stove is at night, with soup simmering on top, cookies in the oven (for more heat, of course!), and a good book. And finally, a coverlet-laden bed, flannel nightie and bed-socks. I didn't know I was missing all that until it wasn't here!

Alice Parker

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THE 2007 MELODIOUS ACCORD
FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
Hawley, MA

Study with Alice Parker

For adventurous musicians who wish to expand their horizons:

June 15-18, 2007 Melody Studies. Explore what happens when we sing with and for each other. Based on Alice's book, The Anatomy of Melody.

July 15-22, 2007 Teaching Melody through Song Leading. An in-depth study of song leading, including intensive melodic analysis, repertoire, planning SINGS and hands-on practice in leading both small and large groups.

October 14-21 2007 Composers Workshop. For those wishing to share their work with a small, non-judgmental group. The focus is on setting texts and writing for voices, through daily assignments and discussions.

January 15-18, 2008 Score Study in New York City. Three days of intensive Score Study in Manhattan. There is reasonable housing available, and time to explore the city's cultural attractions.

For further information, contact Kay Holt at 413-536-1753 or kay@aliceparker.com

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FROM OUR FELLOWS

"On an even deeper level, I am grateful to you for pushing me back into the real world of living, breathing, mystical, magical music-making, the one the exigencies of my profession and education tried to drum out of me. I think my tears . . . were the outward manifestation of that catharsis. You have made a huge difference in my life."

M. Witte

"I keep thinking of our week with you, and the many ways the experience changed me. In regard to composition, I'm not sure it has changed my style so much as it has streamlined the process. Your approach limits the possibilities, and I find nothing so helpful in the creative process as limits... From the bottom of my heart, thank you for a memorable and transformative week. I failed to mention the changes in my teaching method that you inspired..."

T. Jolly

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DOING and BEING

This is the result of pondering on the paradox of action and inaction, and the difference between Western thought and Eastern "as exemplified in the Tao." I seem to live in an uneasy tension between the two. Does the examined life need both?

Doing		Being
Rational	•	Intuitive
Exerting Power	•	Empowering
Controlling	•	Letting Go
Product	•	Process
Competing	•	Meeting
Amassing	•	Divesting
Pushing	•	Yielding
Making Changes	•	Accepting As Is
Continual Striving	•	Going with the Flow
Overcome Limits	•	Accept Limits
Western	•	Eastern
Individual	•	Group
Humans	•	Nature
Future	•	Now
Improve	•	Affirm
Worry	•	Contentment
Lack of Time	•	Timeless
Changing Others	•	Changing Self
Works	•	Faith
Machines	•	People
[Bulldozer	•	Water]
Mother	•	Grandmother
First World	•	Third World

Alice Parker

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"I think of composers as setting up possibilities, not creating objects. There's no such thing as Beethoven's Seventh. It's only a hypothesis... Pieces of music are wormholes, which we can enter to escape our normal experience of time."

From The New Yorker, August 21, 2006, pg. 69,
in an interview with Robert Spano, Conductor,
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

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COUNTING

The Islanders, of course, don't count their rhythmic patterns; they "feel" them and do them... I asked Mrs. Jones to be- gin and explained that I wanted Miss Emma Ramsey . . . to come in next so, as I put it, "I can see how her clap rhythm works against yours." Mrs. Jones smiled gently. "Emma don't clap against me; she claps with me

"If you know how to clap and what you're clapping for, you can come out right with the song"

From Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs & Stories
from the Afro-American Heritage,
by Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes,
1972, Harper & Row

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© 2007 MELODIOUS ACCORD, INC.
All rights reserved. To obtain permission to reprint any part of this newsletter, send requests in writing to 96 Middle Rd, Hawley, MA 01339.

The Melodious Accord Newsletter is published three times a year, reaching 4000 musicians in the United States and Canada.

Send address changes, deletions, name changes, etc. to Kay Holt, 34 Ashfield Lane, South Hadley, MA 01075; (413) 536-1753 phone and fax; e-mail:newsletter@melodiousaccord.org.

Contents:

From The Board

Contemplation And Craft

From A Sermon

The View From Here

The 2007 Melodious Accord

From Our Fellows

Doing And Being

What They're Saying About Anatomy Of Melody

Quote Of The Day

Counting

Home Page
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