The Northwest Files

Music, No Music

In addition to being hotter and drier than usual, this summer has been a drag for another important reason. None of the music in which I’d planned to be involved has panned out.

Sisters Folk Festival Bluegrass Jam Camp? Nope. I was unwell.

American Banjo Camp? Nope. I was unwell.

Sisters Folk Festival Americana Song Academy? Nope. I was unwell.

Central Oregon Mastersingers fall concert? Nope – that’s upcoming, I’m going to sit it out. I feel fine, but I think that I’d better lay low for a while.

If there’s a lesson here, it is that it’s dangerous to take things for granted.

I’ve been going along fine for a very long time, not a hint of health issues.

Then, wham! Health issues.

Most are resolved, or soon will be. But at my age, 79, each of these musical opportunities becomes more precious, as there’s no way to know how many more of them I will be able to attend – a thought which, in the wake of this summer, suddenly occupies space in my mind.

But the horizon continues to beckon.

On that horizon is the Sisters Folk Festival. That’s next weekend. We will attend. Of course we will! We always do.

And the Mastersingers Christmas concert also looms. For that, we’re doing the Christmas section of The Messiah. (You know that The Messiah is in two sections – the Christmas section and the Easter section, right? Of course you do.

This Messiah performance is especially important to me. Singing The Messiah marked the beginning of my career as a choral singer – I was probably 16 years old, a boarding-school student who was blessed with a charismatic music teacher, the late Fredrick L. Lorenz.

Singing it again this year will close the circle for me.

In the meantime, I plan to continue noodling on my guitar and banjo, just like I always have. That always makes me feel good and buoys my spirits. With luck, I’ll continue to do that for a very long time.

-JFT

Banjo Backsliding

In 1959 I was 16 years old and desperate for a banjo. I had no idea how to play a banjo, but buoyed by the burgeoning folk movement, I knew that I needed one. I found one not far from where I lived – a gorgeous old S.S. Stewart – and I bought it. I still have it. I bought Pete Seeger’s record, “The 5-String Banjo Instructor,” which I also still have, and off I went, digging deep into the banjo’s folk roots. Here's a look at my old Stewart. As always, you can click on this image to see it fullsize.

That kept me happy for many years – until I acquired a hard-core bluegrass banjo.  I wanted to learn how to play bluegrass.

I took weekly lessons for maybe three years and after a great deal of practice/woodshedding, became reasonably adept. And then I stopped. I have no idea why. I’ve not played at all in the 10 years since my lessons stopped. I got lazy and bored. I backslid – not least because I didn’t have anyone with whom I could play music.

Starting again seemed like a good thing to do, if only because spending lots of money and time on lessons and practice, then letting all of that waste away with the passage of time, seems really stupid.

With all this in mind, in September I will attend the American Banjo Camp, three days and nights of intensive instruction and jamming. But there is a complication. As noted, I haven’t been playing. How in the world can I immerse myself in a banjo-rich environment without being able to play?

To solve this problem, I booked myself into a lesson with a local instructor who asked me to play a bit so that he could assess where I am. I spent about an hour with this guy, fumbling around while trying to get through examples of what I’d learned 10 years ago. “You don’t need lessons,” he said. “You need to sit down and practice what you already know.”  Here's a look at a proper bluegrass banjo.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve dug out the instructional material from my lessons and have started to relearn not just techniques and licks, but whole songs. These include standards from Earl Scruggs like “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Ground Speed;” from Doug Dillard like “Dooley,” “The Old Home Place” and “Doug’s Tune;” plus, more complex material – a melodic solo from “Shuckin’ the Corn,” as played by Marshall Brickman and Eric Weissberg; “Deputy Dalton,” played by Alan Munde, and more.

At first, this was slow going. I’m about two weeks along now and making a bit of progress, though sometimes getting into playing shape seems like a very tall order indeed. There’s a lot of work to be done. Most of that work involves not just playing the same tunes over and over, but playing the same phrases, or even measures, over and over until I can nail them – my fingers don’t always want to cooperate. This can become tiresome. But at other times, I find that the more I play around with this, the more I remember. We shall see.

I have such a long way to go but I’m enjoying this music. I still don’t have a musical co-conspirator, but I’m going to keep at it. I’d be crazy not to, having realized how much I was in danger of losing.

­–JFT

Music Refresh

This fall is going to be a busy one.

First, weekly Central Oregon Mastersingers rehearsals (in this photo from our 2020 Tango Mass concert, I'm back there in the bass section) resume in September. We will work on materials for our fall and Christmas concerts: the Heart Mountain Suite and other selections for fall, selections from The Messiah or maybe all of it, and more, for Christmas. I kind of hope we do the entire oratorio. It’s lots of fun to sing. But we shall see.

Second, I will attend the American Banjo Camp, a three-day affair that I signed up for to replace another event I was unable to attend. I planned to attend the Bluegrass Jam camp, organized by the folks at the Sisters Folk Festival but when the time for that rolled around, I was ill and was forced to cancel. Bummer!

That’s OK – the ABC features small classes in banjo and guitar taught by fine musicians. It combines both folk and bluegrass, right up my alley. I might be in danger of actually learning something; my skills might actually improve and God knows there's plenty of room for that. For that to happen, however, plenty of banjo woodshedding is in order. I’ve not played for a while, though I have played a lot of guitar. Why? I have no idea. But it’s past time to scrape the rust from my banjo fingers.

Third, the Americana Song Academy, for which I was on a waiting list, just notified me that a few spots were open because of cancellations. I jumped on one of them. This event features small classes in music and songwriting taught by Sisters Folk Festival performers. It is held outside Camp Sherman, Oregon, and in addition to its obvious benefits, it’s also a fine way to preview the folk-festival acts and decide which are the ones most important to see. It will be the third Song Camp, as it’s called, that I’ve attended. I’m not really a writer of songs, but I’ve nevertheless been inspired to write a couple, the most notable of which is a protest song about the importance of voting. Of course it is! This photo is from the 2019 Song Camp. Again, I'm there in the back row.

Fourth and finally, the Sisters Folk Festival, a three-day event filled with an interesting mix of musics presented on a variety of stages, small and large, in Sisters, Oregon, about 15 miles from us. We always have company for this one. We always have a ball.

All four of these activities put gas in my musical tank, the only downside being that attending them forces me to be around people. Not my favorite thing. But I’m thrilled about them all. And stoked. In spite of the people.

-JFT

When Convenience is Bad

Lately, I’ve been stressing about cameras. The point of having a decent camera is to make decent photographs. I’m not sure that I’ve been doing that.

I’ve relied very heavily for the last number of years on a tiny but very effective Sony RX-100. It’s easy to carry, very powerful, has a great lens. But lately the photos I’ve made with it increasingly look to me like snapshots.

I freakin’ hate that. I’m not interested in making snapshots.

I bought this Sony – two of them, one for me, one for Laura – because of their incredible convenience. Because of that convenience, I’ve been leaving my DSLR kit – a pro-level Canon body and a quartet of Canon pro-level lenses, at home, in the closet. I’ve worn out that poor little Sony – it expired the other day after making 6,434 exposures – while not using the Canon the way it’s supposed to be used.

That’s because the damned thing is heavy. It’s cumbersome. It’s very complicated.

But I’m a big, strong guy and I know how to use the thing. I think that I’ve just gotten lazy.

I think that the DSLR requires more of me; I think that the art of photography requires more. It is so smart that anyone can just put the DSLR into “automatic” mode, throw the viewfinder up to an eye, press the button, and get a pretty good photo. But there’s something about a camera like this that invites the photographer to take his/her time. I’m thinking that not answering that call has been a stupid, lazy mistake.

I’ve got it out now. It’s here sitting on my desk. Its battery was nearly flat so that’s in the charger. But even without its battery, it has heft. It’s a serious tool. It’s the proper thing for proper photography.

None of this is the fault of the Sony. It’s my fault. The Sony makes things so easy that I just let it. It makes it easy to rush, makes it easy to be lazy. I find that I tend to be more deliberate with the Canon, taking more time to consider composition and settings. Taking one’s time can only result in better photos.

Because of this line of thought, I’m going to spend a lot more time with the Canon trying to make photographs. We’ll see how that works out.

-JFT

Swiss Idyll

I mentioned a few days ago that we’d been traveling, that the first part of our trip had us aboard a canal barge/hotel in France’s Burgundy region.

When we disembarked from the barge, we – the five of us in our party, Laura, Marilyn, Barbara and Kati – began the second part of our adventure. We made our way to Lausanne, Switzerland, where we picked up a rental car, the better to continue our explorations. Well, it wasn’t exactly a car. It was a VW van, large enough for the five us and our luggage. So large, in fact, that it barely fit into underground parking areas and surface parking places.

Diesel powered, it burned just a half tank of fuel during this second week of the trip. Good, right? Refilling it cost $110. Bad! Fuel always has been very expensive in Europe. That remains the case.

Best now, I think, to transition to photos shot by both Laura and me. My photos are a mix of exposures from the Sony RX-100 cameras Laura and I carry when we travel and my iPhone 13 ­– this because after exactly 6,434 exposures, most of them doubled RAW/JPEG exposures, My RX100 died and the iPhone became my fallback. And yes, I’ve replaced the Sony – with an upgraded model. These little cameras are that good.

Our first stop after finding our way out of busy Lausanne was Saint Saphorin, a tiny town perched on a hillside, bracketed by extensive vineyards on one side and Lake Geneva on the other. Here’s a look. Pretty, no?

We did a bit of hiking in Saint Saphorin and found ourselves at the foot of stone stairs that led upward into the vineyards. We also had lunch there at a little restaurant called Auberge de l’Onde. It was the best lunch we had this second week.

Then we drove to our hotel in Montreux, at the east end of the lake, and set out to explore the Chateau de Chillon, a medieval castle sited just at the lake’s edge. Here’s a look at the moat that protects the castle. It does a very poor job of keeping tourists out. Montreux is an interesting place with a glitzy and expensive new town and a nice old town. The old town was where we found an Indian restaurant called Chez Bilia with really great food.

Chillon is built on solid rock. The tour trail sends you right down to the foundations, where you find rooms in which prisoners were held and executed. Doesn’t look especially comfortable, does it.

Chillon is a very interesting place that’s been beautifully preserved. Here’s a look at one of its interior galleries.

Marilyn, one of our traveling partners and a dear old friend, and me, discussing the attributes of cannons.

Here’s a nice shot of the rooftops of Chillon and the east end of Lake Geneva. This is one of Laura's photos. Way better than the ones I took of the same vista.

When you’re in Montreux, you’re very close to Gruyere, the little town that gives its name to the well-known cheese commonly used in fondue. Naturally, we had fondue for lunch. It was delicious.

Here's Laura and Barbara enjoying fondue. One pan was made with mushrooms, the other was truffles.

Gruyere is another place that has an interesting medieval castle. Here’s Laura standing in one of its fireplaces to give you an idea of the scale of the thing. Imagine lugging the firewood in.

The castle has beautiful formal gardens. Here’s a look.

From Montreux, we drove on to Interlaken and Lauterbrunnen. The Aare River runs through the middle of Interlaken, which as its name suggests, sits between two lakes – the Brienzersee and the Thunersee. Laura tested the river’s temperature. Cold, she reported.

Another look at the Aare and Interlaken’s old town. It’s a very pretty place.

Our purpose for coming here was not Interlaken, however. It was the Lauterbrunnen Gorge and our hotel in Wengen, a tiny town perched high above Lauterbrunnen in which cars are forbidden and which you can reach only by cogwheel train after parking your vehicle in the parking garage at the Lauterbrunnen train station – another place with micro parking spaces. The valley is impressive, a bit like Yosemite Valley.

 

No vehicle traffic in Wengen, except for tiny cargo vehicles used to keep hotels and the few stores supplied. That means it's a very quiet place.

When in the Lauterbrunnen area, a fun and interesting thing to do is to take the cable cars to the top of the Schilthorn, a peak across the gorge from the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau, mountains of legend. Here’s Laura and me with the trio of granite monsters in the distance behind us.

Wengen isn’t the only town in this area without automobile traffic. Murren is another such town. We paused there for lunch on our way back down from the Schilthorn. Unlike Wengen, it was very busy with tourists.

Murren is an interesting mix of old and new, with busy construction, brand new hotels and shops intermixed with ancient houses like this one.

Now deep into this final week of our trip, we programmed a free day. What to do, what to do? Barbara and Kati decided to take a cogwheel train to the top of the Jungfrau. Laura, Marilyn and I decided that we wanted to see the lower countryside. We did that by taking a long loop – again on a cogwheel train – from Wengen to Grindelwald, from there to Lauterbrunnen, and then back to Wengen, pretty much an all-day trip. To do that, we headed up from Wengen and changed trains at a remote station at the top of the pass between Wengen and Grindelwald. It’s an austere place called Kleine Scheidegg that is situated at a saddle in the mountain landscape. People ride the train to this spot, then explore the hiking trails. As you can see, it is at the foot of some serious mountains and one huge glacier.

Kleine Scheidegg contains some interesting old buildings. Here’s a look at a couple of them.

Taken down the mountain from Kleine Schiedegg approaching Grindelwald, these two photos provide an idea of what this part of Switzerland looks like. Very beautiful hillsides studded with the huts and cabins of local farmers.

This brought us to the end of our trip. We left Wengen and drove to Geneva, where we turned in our van and overnighted, then flew home, a place we were very happy to reach. The cats, who had been watched over by a house/cat sitter, were happy to have us back. At least I think that they were.

-JFT

France the Slow Way

In early 2020 we thought we’d take a little trip. The idea for this trip hatched after talking to some pals who spent five years operating a barge on the old canals of France.

These are not the enormous barges that cruise Europe’s rivers. Rather, they are small craft, the longest at just about 130 feet because anything longer would not fit in the canals’ locks. They have a very limited number of cabins.

The cruise experience we chose is very personal and intimate. It begins outside the bustling city of Dijon and provides a close look at rural France.

There are many options, including the most common – one of the many corporate-owned barges. Our friends, however, suggested something special. They suggested the Magnolia, owned and operated – indeed, restored into its current very comfortable three-cabin configuration, by owners Magali and Nicolas Rancelot, who bring their brilliant dog, Gypsy, along.

Then came Covid. The trip was postponed for 2020. It was postponed again for 2021. Finally, this year, 2022, it seemed safe and prudent to go ahead. So we did.

With barges like this one, you don’t book a cabin as you would do on a cruise ship. You must charter the whole barge. This means that you must round up enough co-adventurers to fill all the barge’s cabins – in this case, three – so that the cost of the cruise can be manageable for all parties.  

We did that. Old pal and classmate Marilyn Etcheverry and her partner, Barbara Broderick, came along; so did our friend Katrina Hays.

This cruise begins at a small harbor in Plombières, just west of Dijon, a few miles out of town, and ends at the barge harbor in Escommes, about 50 miles from the trip’s starting point. During the course of the trip, Magnolia passes through 49 locks that date from the 19^th century, when this canal, the Canal de Bourgogne in Southern Burgundy, was in steady commercial use.

We were confident that we were going to see beautiful countryside and that Magnolia’s chef, Loic, was going to provide us with wonderful food and wine. We were not disappointed.

Interested in learning more? Here’s where to go for information. Cruising France's canals

To set the tone for boarding on Saturday morning and a week of superlative food, Friday night, June 2, we treated ourselves to dinner at William Frachot, a wonderful restaurant that has two Michelin stars. It was everything we’d hoped for, and more. 

Here's a look at the cheese cart that closed out our dinner. Abundant, no?

The next morning we goofed around in Dijon’s scenic Old Town and at 3 pm, Nicholas, who goes by Nico, picked us up outside our hotel with the Magnolia’s Volkswagen van, a vehicle in which Magali would take us to many interesting places as the trip progressed.

From this point on, rather than compose a running narrative, I’ll transition to photos and captions. 

Here's a look at Magnolia, a very pretty craft.

This is Magnolia's salon. That door at the far end of the room leads to Magnolia's three cabins. The dining area is behind the camera's position.

There was so much more to this trip than just floating along the canal. It was studded with activities. The first one involved a visit to a truffle farm. Here's the farmer and his dog demonstrating the truffle hunt, which was followed by a lunch featuring everything truffle.

The countryside through this piece of Burgandy is rolling and hilly so the canal must climb and fall. It does that via a series of locks that are opened and closed by two-person teams of locktenders.

The twin doors at each end of the lock are opened and closed manually by pushing on a large lever. That's what's happening here, with Nico, our captain, doing the pushing.

Here's a nice photo of Magnolia underway with the crew hard at work. That's Valentine at the bow, coiling a line, Nico and Magi looking on. The canal is lined by a paved path. This allowed us to walk for much of the trip, easy to do because the barge travels very slowly.

Magnolia enters a lock slowly, carefully, with the locktenders looking on and Valentine ready to secure Magnolia once it's fully inside.  The tenders are ready to close the entry gates and fill the lock to lift Magnolia to the next level. Nico has done this job for a long time. He is a master of control.

The canal runs through some very pretty, very peaceful countryside. The cattle seem content.

The canal meanders, which adds to the interest of sightseers. The hiker there on the right, trudging along though the rain, is our pal Marilyn.

An interesting activity? Loic, our chef, took us back to the central market in Dijon, where he bought the ingredients for the day's lunch. It's a huge place filled with vendors of all kinds. This photo doesn't do it justice - it probably shows less than a quarter of the market.

This is Loic explaining to us all what he plans to do. From left, that's Marilyn, Barb and Magi.

Beautiful produce. Here's Kati, left, Marilyn and Laura checking out some melons.

Once Loic had what he needed for lunch, he headed back to Magnolia. In the meantime, Magi treated us to a walking tour of old Dijon.

Our tour followed the Owl Walk, which leads to a small statue of an owl that is said to have brought the old city luck. Tourists are encouraged to touch the owl to get some luck of their own. Here's Laura doing just that. So many people have caressed the owl that its features are nearly worn away.

Each of the canal's locks has a locktender's house.  They range from being in a state of disrepair to gorgeous reconstructions done by people who have leased them.  Here's one of the latter.  This one is run by a chef who fed us one night in the building at the far right.
This is Chateauneuf, an ancient walled town. It is, as you can see, very beautiful and was one of the places we visited with Magi, our tour guide and co-owner of Magnolia.

Chateauneuf is beautifully restored. It was an excellent place for lunch. This is our gang about to enter the castle.

Another lockhouse. These little buildings are so cute that it was hard to resist shooting photos of them.
I happened to have a birthday toward the end of the cruise. Magnolia's crew surprised me, and all the rest of us, I think, with a bit of a celebration that included some excellent French folk music from these two excellent performers.

Naturally, the celebration included cake. Yum!
And that brought us to the end of our six days aboard Magnolia. Our profound thanks to the excellent crew and hosts, from left, Brigitta, Nico, Valentine, Magi and Loic. What a wonderful bunch. We were very fortunate to be able to spend time with them and to get to know them.

Thanks for taking the time to read through this. I appreciate it.

-JFT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Equipment failure

Laura and I just got home from a trip. A longish one – 18 days on the road. It was pretty much problem-free, with two important exceptions.

First, early in the trip, the stainless steel band on my watch broke. One of the pins holding a link together just gave up and slowly allowed the watch to depart from my wrist. Fortunately, it happened in a kind of weird slow-mo, so I was able to cup my hand and catch the thing before it hit the ground.

I’ve worn this watch every day for at least the last 30 years. My left wrist doesn’t feel right without it. My first impulse was to try to find a shop that could fix the band. (A new generic band was not in the cards – the band is specific to this brand and style of watch.) But then it occurred to me that it’s been many years since this watch was serviced. It’s been running a bit fast. It’s a quality mechanical watch that I wind every day and is designated as a chronometer, so inaccuracy is not expected.

I decided to send it to a factory-authorized shop for repairs – the closest to us is in Culver City, Calif. This will take at least a couple of weeks. The repair price is stout. Gulp. I sent it off anyway.

In the meantime, I’m wearing an inexpensive Seiko quartz watch that is very like my regular watch – bought several years ago, in fact, to take the pressure off my good one. It works fine, far better than it should, given its modest price.

My watch did not represent the only equipment failure on this trip. In 2013, sick of hauling a heavy bag filled with cameras and lenses on long trips, I bought a Sony RX-100 camera. It’s a tiny thing, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. But with its large sensor and Zeiss zoom lens, it will do about 85 percent of what my DSLR system will do, and at very close to the same image quality – I make 12 x 18 prints from the images that it's recorded and the image quality and sharpness of those remains exemplary.

This happened during the last few days of our trip. The camera decided that it didn’t want to turn off. I pulled the battery, put the battery back in, and fired it up. What I got on the view screen was a weird micro-plaid pattern and nothing else. This camera needed help.

This camera, a first-generation of this model, is still repairable. But the cost of repairs is very stout indeed. Sony is now building a seventh-gen model of this camera. These are quite expensive, about double what I paid for this gen-one camera in 2013. Then I found that brand-new gen-three models are available for not much more than the repair cost.

This seemed like a slam-dunk. I bought one. Same camera, same size, less money than I paid for the old first-gen model. But its lens and sensor are upgraded, it contains several interesting useful new features, and the software is considerably more sophisticated. Learning to use this thing will be fun.

What I’m hoping now is that I see no more equipment failures for a good long while. At the very least, my poor bank account doesn’t need the pressure. And I don’t need the frustration.

-JFT

...and Be There

If you’re a grizzled old press photographer, you know how the above phrase begins. It says, “f11 and be there.” It emphasizes the importance not only of being in the right place at the right time, but of having one’s camera ready to go.

Why f11? One reason is that f11 is pretty much the center point between a camera lens’s largest and smallest openings. It’s a median point for exposure.

So: You choose aperture mode, set the aperture you want, and let the camera (really, these days they’re computers that just happen to wear lenses) decide on an appropriate shutter speed.

But there’s a second reason to adore f11, along with its neighbors f8 and f16: Those middle areas of the aperture range are where most (admittedly, not all, but most) lenses are at their sharpest. Smaller apertures (f32, for instance, and on up to f64) start to bend the light in weird ways, compromising sharpness; larger apertures (most of the time, but not all) can be compromised by the quality of affordable lens material and the way the lens elements are ground to permit larger apertures. Here’s a shot of a fawn hiding in our back yard made using f11. Pretty darned sharp. Click on it to see it fullsize.

In the old days, remembering “f11 and be there” was a way to be sure that you were ready to make an exposure that probably was printable. Car crash? Police shootout? Bank robbery? Good to go, as long as you’re in daylight.

These days, many people use their cameras in automatic mode, not worrying about settings. I do prefer to fuss with them, so I mostly use aperture priority. I’ve done test photos with all three of my zoom lenses and sure enough, they’re at their sharpest at f11. But they’re also pretty damned sharp at f8 and f16, which provides just a little bit of aperture latitude.

There is a cool workaround if you want to have your cake and eat it too – that is, choose your own aperture and shutter speed, and to heck with what the available lighting suggests.

What you do is this: Set your camera on manual, select the exposure settings you want, and then select your camera’s automatic ISO setting. Depending on your camera, using this scheme in low light might result in what’s called “noise,” kind of like the grain we used to get in high-speed films. It’s the result of pushing your camera’s sensor too hard – mine, for instance, doesn’t like ISOs much higher than 800. Yours probably is different. You have to do some test shots to be sure. In any case, you’ll probably get a decent shot.

This is better, though: f11 and be there.

-JFT

Music of Mourning

A requiem is a funeral mass for the dead, most often sung by a choir. It usually relies on biblical texts for its lyrics. Most of the great composers have at least one requiem to their names. Not all of them soar, but many of them do.

I’ve sung choral music since I was a teenager and have been lucky enough to have participated in the presentation of many of these masterworks. But never the one left to us by Johannes Brahms.

Titled A German Mass, it is a bit different from the rest of its kind in that it does not employ biblical texts. Instead, Brahms (May 7, 1833 – April 3, 1897), who worked during the Romantic period, found textual material that spoke to him, in his grief, most directly. He was mourning the passing of his mother.

The Brahms mass consists of seven sections. If you’ve been around choral music at all, you may know the most familiar of these – it’s Number Four, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place.” It is gentle, lovely and lyrical. It’s very satisfying to sing and to hear. It also isn’t all that difficult to do. It’s not possible to make that last statement about much of the rest of A German Requiem.

It's written in a variety of keys and a variety of time signatures and tempos, from slow and languid to fast and frantic. It’s also employs a variety of keys and is studded with “accidentals” – extra sharps and flats that aren’t part of the original key. The bass part, which is what I (try to) sing, at one point even contains a double-flat. You don’t often see those. Violin-family instruments, trombones and singers can find those subtle notes. But they don’t exist on pianos, trumpets, etc.

We, the Central Oregon Mastersingers, have been working hard on A German Requiem so that we can present it in concert in Bend on April 10 and 11. In a departure for us, it will be presented without admission fees to honor the 900,000 (or so) Americans who have died as a result of Covid.

Covid, in fact, has greatly complicated our concert plans because until last week, we were not able to rehearse as a unit. Instead, we got together on Zoom, which is neither terribly satisfying nor terribly productive, at least for me. We’ve also rehearsed and learned individually using rehearsal tools based on the Web. This seems to have worked out well.

Our first rehearsal as a group, held because in our area the Covid risk was judged to have abated, on March 7 showed promise. Our next rehearsal, this past Monday, showed just how hard everyone has worked and how well this glorious piece of music is coming together for us (he knocks on wood). I think that we’re ahead of where we usually are when a concert is just a few weeks away.

What I’ve found, and have heard from other members of the choir, is that this music is so compelling, so emotional, so challenging, that we are all determined to give it our very best. That’s always the case when we prepare for a concert, but this time it seems to be something special. I suspect that we all feel, all 45 of us, that we owe our audience and especially those we’ve lost our very best effort. And I think we all feel that we are failing Herr Brahms, our estimable conductor, and ourselves if we don’t do everything we can to polish this music to the best of our abilities.

I haven’t had so much fun singing, and I haven’t enjoyed a piece of music so much, as I have as we’ve worked to get the Brahms Requiem ready. I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of its presentation. I hope that you get a chance to hear it soon. In fact, I wish that you could be here for our presentation.

-JFT

Back to the Old Confederacy? Hell, No!

If I could boil down the philosophies of the Republican Party as it’s existed since the era of Ronald Reagan, it would be as “the politics of racism and greed.”

A few years ago, I mentioned this to an old friend and former classmate, a Trump Republican. She was mightily offended, exclaiming, “I’m not a racist! I have Black friends!”

I reminded her that she supported a candidate and a philosophy (as far as I know, she still does) that seeks to prevent her Black friends from voting. She was without response.

Then came the summer of 2019, the Black Lives Matter movement, the focus on the deaths of unarmed Black men by white cops, and much more. All of this seemed to bring racial animosity out of the closet, to make it clear that when Republicans say they want “freedom,” what they mean is that they want freedom only for themselves, and not for anyone else, to make it clear that the current iteration of the Republican Party will settle for nothing less than the tenets and philosophies of the Old Confederacy.                     

They’re in the minority and they know it. That's one of the reasons that they maintain a death grip on the filibuster, wielded by Plantation Mitch McConnell so effectively, and the Electoral College, both tools of America’s racist past. What they’re working to achieve is called nullification.

I was reminded of this while reading a book titled “The 1619 Project,” created by Pulitzer Prize winner Nicole Hannah-Jones. I found an interesting paragraph in a chapter titled “Politics,” by New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. It reads as follows: “The government Calhoun (he’s referring to John C. Calhoun, a senator from South Carolina who was also the country’s seventh vice president and a vigorous supporter of slavery) envisioned would protect the system by defending ‘liberty,’ not of the citizen, but of the master, the liberty of those who claimed the right to property at a position at the top of racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty, Calhoun stated, was ‘a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be lavished on all alike – a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving – and not a boon to be bestowed on the people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or enjoying of it.’”

When Calhoun said, “a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving,” he was talking about white people and only white people. Especially white males.

Calhoun supported the doctrine of nullification, which professed that individual states had a right to reject federal policies that they deemed unconstitutional.

Calhoun supported the supposed right of a minority to nullify the wishes of a majority. That’s what today’s Republican Party supports.

They are attempting to pervert democracy. They would eliminate the concept of One Person, One vote. Nullification, in other words. Just as Putin would nullify the right of Ukrainians to self-determination.

We fought and won a Civil War to end the Confederacy and its notions of white superiority, of minority rule. Let us keep it in the dust bin of history, where it belongs.

We must cement in place the right of every citizen to vote. We must ensure that every vote counts. We will not be nullified!

-JFT