Category: Arts & Letters

THEN THERE’S PERFORMING IN PUBLIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Can I really be coming up on my fifth year in the choir that’s evolved into the Revels Singers? Hard to believe, especially when I hear the astonishing, velvety sound around me in rehearsal — one that’s getting even crisper as we develop.

The only experience I’d had before joining was Mennonite a cappella hymns sung in experienced circles and then later some Quaker ad hoc four-part chorales. Working with the Boston Revels organization has been a much more intimidating and rewarding challenge, especially for an untrained singer who had only some background in violin.

One thing that has surprised me is how hard it is to hear myself. Leaving a new message on the telephone answering machine (remember those?) always came as a shock. Whose voice was that, anyway? It was lower and thicker than what I hear in my head. Add to that the reality that we don’t hear ourselves snore – how can that be? I’ve learned to recognize the vibration in my throat but never hear an actual sound. What a mystery!

As a singer, what I sense more is a vibration than hearing an actual voice. At least that’s the best I can describe. I hear the voices around me instead and adjust to them as needed. And, yes, I hear the times when we’re full and rich in all our glory.

I do recall an event a few months ago when we were in the sanctuary rather than the adjacent room of the church where we practice. We formed a big circle around the pews and were singing in mixed formation but, as it turned out, I was the only bass in my quarter of the room and so, when we had a line to ourselves, I heard my voice arching out to the center – like a fishing line being cast into water, as I recall. It was thinner and lighter than I expected. Hmm.

Another big surprise has come in the experience of performing, in contrast to rehearsals.

We practice in a room of fine acoustics and have a good time together as we move closer and closer to some higher standard. We gain a familiarity in that space and probably react to it. And rehearsing is always filled with interruptions as we reexamine a passage to tweak something, explore other possibilities, correct our pitch, or simply make it better or more convincing.

Each performance, though, is a unique experience. It feels quite different from what we normally do.

Since I’m not confident enough to give up my printed score – my memorization has always been faulty when it comes to words and music. I’m always rewriting them as I go, so on stage I need to have room to open my book. That, as I’ve learned, is not always a given. Nor is sufficient light. And even when both are adequate, there are times when I look down on the page with a sense that I’ve never, ever seen this piece of music before. How many times have we rehearsed it? Well, I am getting better at memorization, just in case.

You never really know quite what to expect, but each time you’ll discover something new. This really does put everything to the test. Outdoors, especially, can be difficult when it comes to hearing the others. You have to trust the director and, if you’re in a decent position, what you see of the others.

No matter what, though, the performance turns into an altered state of consciousness. I’m focused on our conductor, my colleagues, the music and lyrics, and to a degree on our audience and setting – and for a give span of time, we’re in a corded shell, as poet John Dryden once described it. (Somehow, I’d rather have that as chorded shell, but there I go revising.) We begin, we are, we finish. Leaving the stage, we grin at each other. That was … fun, yes, along with something quite different and inexplicable.

All that practice seems gone in such a short time. Well, it is like preparing a feast, especially if you consider raising your own ingredients. I love it when we have an audience that leaves feeling well fed, even euphoric.

NEXT!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Caterpillar, one of the legendary periodicals in 20th century American poetry, set out with an intriguing premise – that three years was about all a literary journal could do before repeating itself or exhausting its commission. (Never mind that it went twice that.)

Somehow, Friends have found that for some offices, three-year terms work best; while they may be extended, six years becomes the upper limit. After that, the officer rotates into a new place of service.

The Red Barn’s been at it five years now – launching its four subsidiary blogs along the way. And for those of you who’ve been blogging much longer, you’ve truly earned my respect. It’s a lot of work, no doubt about it.

~*~

This past year, especially, has been intense as I’ve released some long pent-up emotions and thoughts about polity in action. (Remember, though, my degree was in political science, and I entered journalism with a sense of public service that was, in a psychically bruising degree, thwarted to the corporate profit sheet.)

So here we are, in face of the thugs who’ve been attacking our free speech and American values. However the election turned out.

And I’m still fired up, even if I’m looking at a more leisurely pace in the year ahead.

GIVING VOICE TO A UNIQUELY AMERICAN MUSIC

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

The demands of settling the New World left little time for the first waves of immigrants to attend to the fine arts. Unlike Europe, with its ongoing traditions, America had no courtly patrons or vested institutions. No Lorenzo de Medici or cathedrals, for instance. In fact, many of the Protestants looked askance at the vanity running through many of the arts or questioned the truthfulness of entertaining fictions. The Puritans banned theater, after all, as well as social dancing, at least until yielding where I live on New England contradance. The Quakers and Baptists went further, forbidding music from their worship services altogether.

Something had to bend and, over time, did. Slowly native voices took shape in literature, painting, and music, mostly. To us today, these “primitives” can be refreshing encounters.

In music, much of this impulse surfaced along vocal lines. (Little wonder, considering the rarity of instruments and teachers.) And out of this came a desire for choral music, a community activity of a social nature.

In the absence of trained musicians, though, some music masters, mostly self-taught, opened workshops known as “singing schools” and eventually created a unique notation style we know as “shape-note” scores. These pages have the staves, time signatures, sharps and flats like the scores generally used today, but rather than having the notes themselves be round, some are square or triangles – and each of those markings designates a fa, so, la, ti, do – an ancient foundation for singing.

When singers pick up a hymn from a shape-note book, they run through the music the first time by using the words fa, so, la, ti, do rather than the lyrics, which are introduced once the singers have their musical lines and harmonies in place. And away they go.

Boston tanner William Billings (1746-1800) is regarded as the first American choral composer, and increasingly as an original, even startling, voice. His four-part “fuguing tunes” of one voice after another embracing and embellishing a phrase create bright polyphonic tapestries on Biblical and patriotic texts. Henry Cowell, a major 20th century American composer, has argued that had we heeded Billings rather than later reformers, we would have had a unique serious American musical tradition much earlier than we did. Other observers have said that hearing Billings is like encountering the wonders of music for the first time. I’d agree. While Billings, himself a singing-school master and publisher, did not employ shape notes, much of his music has survived in that style.

In Virginia, the Mennonite Joseph Funk (1778-1862) created a seven-note system still in use among Mennonites and Brethren. Many of those hymns were published in both English and German. (I have several editions of these volumes.) The crossroads where he lived and is buried is now known as Singers Glen. It’s a lovely site.

Best known today is the Sacred Harp, taking its name from a 1844 tunebook once New England choral singing took root in the American South. It’s a loud, lively, even raucous style of four-part a cappella activity – with many of the hymns composed by Billings, in fact.

Historical purists can argue whether shape-note music should be performed in the Sacred Harp style or in the more lyrical piety of the Mennonites and Brethren, which I favor. What I do know is the joy we feel as a choir when we take up pieces from this stream, as well as how difficult and challenging they can be. For the record, we use standard notation, rather than the shape-note scores. No need to further confuse us.

For related poetry collections, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.

A CASE FOR NURTURING SERIOUS READERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

One of the challenges facing contemporary society is the shrinking percentage of active readers. (I say percentage, but fear what we face is more a shrinkage of actual numbers.) It’s not simply the decline in readers of fiction or the number of people who recite poetry from heart, but the lack of literary engagement of any kind. So I rat on myself early here, with my belief that the act of reading carries social value – especially when serious literature is the subject.

It is no mere coincidence that Americans’ widespread ignorance of history and our political system has accompanied the growing addiction to a sensual media orgy – large-screen television, movies, rock music – while habitual reading, including newspapers, has been declining. That is, what is superficial and easy – and ephemeral — has the upper hand. Little is demanded of the receptor, and loud excitement, rather than a deepened awareness, is the expectation; escapism, rather than engagement with life itself. Several European writers have suggested something more troubling is at work – the loss of reflective people, contemplative individuals – a theme I see developed, obliquely, in Stephen L. Carter’s Integrity and the labor of moral discernment. In other words, is the mind being enlarged or merely numbed? The fact that so many people cannot name their own senators or governors or are largely ignorant of geography, yet recognize countless actors and rockers points toward a disintegration of community and social service.

Paradoxically, the act of reading is largely a private enterprise. It’s a dialogue between a reader and a writer, sometimes separated by continents or centuries. It requires more activity from the receptor than a movie, short song, or television sit-com does – in fact, one of the concerns these days is the atrophied state of the imagination among those who have been raised on “electronic media” rather than the printed word or, for that matter, stories read aloud or in radio broadcasts. (There are, after all, degrees of imaginative challenge.) In the act of reading, there are no visible intermediaries – no actors, soundtrack, directors, sets, or costumes. The editor or printer or bookseller is of an entire order altogether. Here, the reader and the writer engage in a dance of the soul or a passionate argument. (Serious readers can be as demanding as lovers when it comes to this relationship.)

But the act of reading can also take us into the existence of another person, viewing the world from within that context. A movie, in contrast, leaves us looking at that person, hoping for a hint of emotion or profundity. The author can reflect on the situation, suggest ranges of experience, voice moral struggles in ways a movie might only touch in passing.

Here I think, too, of large-scale musical compositions – symphonies or string quartets, for instance – that demand intense listening, inducing reflection and emotional awareness. Like reading, the audience for serious music is in decline – and with it, a link to the riches of the past and its aspirations and wisdom.

HERE COMES THE SNOW AGAIN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

New England can be a harsh place. Its winter is long, with snow possible October into April or even longer, at least where I live.

You’re never far from earlier generations, either. They’re hardy as stone.

Each month sinks down through centuries.

As do the poems in this almanac.

The new year’s just around the corner. For your own copy, click here.

Winged Death 1~*~

FINE PRINT CRITICISM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

You know that reaction after reading a page that leaves you with a sensation of missing something. A treatise about poetry or art or theology, especially?

If you’re like me and largely autodidactic, you no doubt feel yourself an outsider. So I write from the fringe, in more ways than one. Reading some reviews and critiques, I soon wonder: Am I simply inattentive? Clueless? Ignorant? Is it that such subtlety, speaking only to the highly initiated, will never accept my own efforts? Or is it that I prefer what is simple, direct, grounded in experience and place, over what is convoluted and cloaked – even in form? Without falling into cliche or triteness?

Or am I the one, despite myself, who becomes convoluted and cloaked? How do we reach higher, anyway, in this thing called art, while striving to stay true … to whatever?

How does originality run through it all? And life?

By the way, just who are the critics writing for? Even when we ourselves turn critic.

SOMETIMES I WONDER IF PANDORA WAS A NOVELIST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it was a mistake earlier this year to reopen the draft of my latest novel, which I’d put aside in July 2015 to season. But I did. (And then, once opened, something like this can become impossible to close tight again – at least until it’s done for now, whenever it decides.)

For the most part, I’m very happy with what I found – nothing embarrassed me, and some sections struck me as quite exciting, especially when I kept asking myself, “Who wrote this!”

Still, it’s been a very slow process for what was supposed to be a read-through, mostly for continuity and consistency. Admittedly, it’s a big book – about twice the length of a typical novel, or 35,000 words more than my longest one yet published. The challenge has been in finding the blocks of time to tackle each of the 16 chapters, and moving along while I have all of the characters floating around in my head. (That alone can turn an author into a rather distant person within a household, even in the middle of conversations.)

I’d made one decision to shift as many of the verb tenses as I could to more accurately reflect the way many people speak when relating events, but determining which verb to change and which one to leave alone – even in a single sentence – could be slow hoeing. (Or is that slow rowing? Another detail to check out later. Even slow going? Yipes, it gets endless.) We’ll see how successfully the verb strategy works.

And then there were the additional details to better explain the action. Instead of big cuts, which I’d anticipated as a normal part of the process at this stage, I found a need to say more. In one chapter, I found that adding no more than two pages actually makes the section move along faster and feel shorter. Anyone else have that experience?

On top of that, as I’ve found in previous manuscripts, certain words repeat through the story and no matter how crucial their underlying meaning to the emerging theme, they simply start sounding like sour notes. In this case, independent, business, gather, vague, vision, even fit topped the demand for thesaurus treatment. Each synonym then amplifies the message and infuses a wider understanding. Still, that step’s tedious.

At the moment, I’m lifted by elation and can breathe that big sigh of relief. It’s done, for now. I’ve shipped off copies to my two harshest in-house critics and can return to other projects before those two fire back with their caustic reactions, brilliant suggestions, essential additions, more essential deletions, smarty quips for my free use, or whatever.

And when that input has gone into the manuscript, I can send it off to a round of beta readers. The ones I’m hoping will be kinder.

There’s no denying my elation, even knowing how much remains to be done before going public.

ANOTHER TRICK OF THE WRITER’S TRADE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes a way to make a chapter feel shorter is by making it longer. Yes, when an author senses a section in progress is beginning to drag for the reader, a quick fix to speed up the action may be by interrupting the block and inserting a new detail – perhaps something that anchors the section to an earlier concern or pointing ahead to a new possibility. This can be something as short as a sentence or an aside, a flash of dialogue, or even a long side street that reconnects down the pike.

When I’m drafting and revising, I’m always surprised when this works.

Of course, don’t rule out the more common alternative. Drastic cuts may give you traction and get straight back to the action.

Or sometimes it’s even a combination of both.

 

PULL UP A SEAT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s a kitchen table, rather than a largely ignored dining room. Or outside, in the rain. Or even a restaurant or diner.

Well, in one of the poems, it’s linen covered beside a black pond. But that’s for a formal occasion.

As for the rest of the series, the pieces reflect home and family and a calling to intimacy. How informal do you want to get? And how do you like your tea?

Returning 1~*~

For your own copy, click here.