7QT

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I wrote yesterday about teaching a holistic, healthy sexuality to our children. I’d love to have more perspectives from parents of older kids. Hint, hint. :)

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As long as I’m asking for advice, I have a sleep question. Michael is now four months old, and he’s having a lot of trouble sleeping during the day. He’s actually slept through the night a few times (gasp! I didn’t know babies did that!) but it’s kind of frustrating during the day. I nurse him to sleep, put him down, he wakes up. Rinse & repeat. Very tiresome, frankly. With the other kids, schedules and nice long naps seemed connected to the “learn to put yourself to sleep” stage–i.e., the let them cry stage. But I’ve never done that until they were at least nine months old–into the object permanence stage. I’m really hesitant to do that with Michael so early. But he’s got to sleep longer than five minutes in a shot!

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I know the first piece of advice is going to be sling/snugli. I did pull out the Snugli last night so I could go outside with my family and enjoy the evening. But a) he didn’t sleep, and b) while I can walk behind my kids with a baby slung across my front, I cannot bend down, throw baseballs, help kids learn to bat and pedal tricycles. So I’m really in a quandary, seeking solutions to the sleep issue. Because a baby who’s tired doesn’t do well with tummy time and learning to play with toys, and so on.

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This week I served as adjudicator for our diocesan music enrichment day. I went into it with a fair amount of nerves. Partly that was because the logistics were so complicated. We had to figure out how to get Alex to his Harry Potter spring break theater camp, which began at the same time I had to be on site in a town half an hour away. And I couldn’t keep the baby with me, because the schedule was so compact. So I had to bring the sitter with me, and figure out how to keep the kids safe and entertained with a sitter. Very complex logistically. I kept having visions of Julianna running off while Michael was inconsolable. Fortunately, like most fears these proved unfounded.

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The other nerves came from the fact that the very first ensemble I critiqued was my gradeschool alma mater, led by my high school band director. However, it proved to be very enjoyable, and a nice chance to catch up with a teacher who had a big influence on me, but whom I haven’t seen in a long time. All in all, it was an experience both energizing and exhausting.

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I have a short fiction work up today. Wondering if it works; I’ve been trying to write this scenario for several years and I still don’t think I’ve nailed it.

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I’m coming up with nothing but boring stuff now, so…have a great weekend!

7 quick takes sm1 7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 168)

Published in: on March 30, 2012 at 7:04 am  Comments (5)  

Playing at St. Paul’s in London

Photo by roger4336, via Flickr

I don’t talk much about music on the blog, which is actually rather odd, considering how saturated my life has always been with the practice and study of music. So today I hope you’ll bear with me as I share a musical story that came to mind while Christian and I were watching National Treasure 2 the other night.

My senior year of high school, I worked tons of close shifts at Taco Bell to save the money to go on a three-week European tour with the U. S. Collegiate Wind Band.

We played concerts almost every day: in the Amsterdam zoo, in a park in Paris (where I had a halting conversation in French with a lovely old man), as part of a German kinderfest, in Salzburg standing beside Mozart’s piano, in Gothic churches and places I can’t even remember. One of the last concerts–perhaps the very last–was at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the church where Charles and Diana were married.

Our big show piece was a band arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Lots of finger work for the woodwinds, with a really big brass finale. And the brass section could not seem to cut off with the conductor. They’d been scolded for it many times over the course of the tour.

Taken during this very piece...the flutist at far left is me.

St. Paul’s was a disorienting space to play in. Flute players like live rooms–they make us sound good–but that day I learned there’s such a thing as too much reverb. It also didn’t help that there was a lot of crowd noise: groups on tours and other individual tourists chatting it up. (The famous houses of prayer in Europe, by and large, are not prayerful at all.) It was hard to hear the sections farthest away from me at all, much less play in concert with them. The simpler pieces weren’t so bad, but that fugue was something else to keep together. I just had to shut off my ears and watch the conductor’s hands.

I breathed a sigh of relief as we finished our complicated finger work and slowed down into the big, brassy finish. The conductor gave us the final cutoff…and the brass kept playing. And playing. Irritated, I turned around to glare at them (because flute players are know-it-all busybodies–I can own my instrument’s personality)–and as the brass note went on and on, I was shocked to see every instrument in resting position, even while the full brass sound rang on and on.

Speaking of instrument personalities…if you aren’t a musician, you might think I’m making this up, but it really is true that certain instruments equal certain personality types. I don’t know if the instrument attracts certain personalities or shapes them after the fact, but for example, you can expect flute players to be divas (that’s a kind descriptor, btw), trumpet players to have huge egos (so far I’ve only met one trumpeter who didn’t fit that mold), saxophone players to be very laid back, and bassoonists to have a strong goofy streak.

Musicians, you want to jump in?

Published in: on February 29, 2012 at 7:36 am  Comments (9)  
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A Trip Down Memory Lane: A 7QT Post

After yesterday’s motherhood moment (it was a good one!), I decided it would be fun to list some schmaltzy, cheesy ’80s music I love. If you’re more in the mood for fiction, head over here for a bit more about Carlo and Alison. If you’re brave, take a little stroll down memory lane! But be warned…1980s vidoes are WEIRD. I’m finding that I’d rather just hear the songs! :)

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(Incidentally, this song has been redone in a screamingly funny “literal” version you really must watch.)

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(Beware the hair!)

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Cheating with this one, as it comes from 1991, but this, to me, is the classic “night” song. Every time I hear it I am transported back to a blue Ford Tempo Galaxy at 1 a.m. as I was leaving Taco Bell after a closing shift.

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There you go! How’s that for a trip down memory lane, 30/40- somethings? :) What are your old favorites?

7 quick takes sm1 7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 150)

Published in: on November 4, 2011 at 5:05 am  Comments (10)  
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Word(y) Wednesday

This is too cute to bury in another post.

For those who might be new visitors from the carnival, meet my daughter: wall-demolisher, universal charmer, mommy-mind-reader, a conduit for Heavenly beauty, and now–aspiring flute player…just like Mommy!

Uh, sweetheart, you might need to turn it around.

She is never more excited about Mommy than when I pull out my flute.  But I will never let her touch it, which makes her less than happy. ;)

Good thing Mommy has a flute student who’s less protective of her instrument. Maybe that’s why Miss K. got the hug of the century.

Sunday at church, I went to the piano to cover for Christian so he could go to Communion, and to my horror, amid “Taste and see,” I saw Julianna lifting my, um, let’s just say as-expensive-as-a-used-car flute off its peg. Is it acceptable to leave the congregation hanging in order to save an expensive repair bill? Fortunately, Christian saw as well, and rescued my poor flute from the clutches of my over-eager daughter.

(Sharing today at Angie’s Wordful Wednesday roundup , at You Capture: Fun with I Should Be Folding Laundry, and at 5 Minutes For Special Needs: Special Exposure Wednesday)

Published in: on April 6, 2011 at 4:02 am  Comments (8)  
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Let Everything That Has Breath (or: Beating a Dead Horse)

Just before my alarm went off, 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I had the most amazing dream. We were attending Mass at the Newman Center, and singing the new Mass parts. They were chants, as a matter of fact, but the most gorgeous, melodic chants I’d ever heard, and expanded into gorgeously rich harmony that made the very air hum. And ringed around the exterior of the church stood dozens of people, children and adults, bearing small percussion instruments—agogô, cabasa, güiro, and others I know by sight and sound but for which I know no names. It was a tight ensemble; I looked around and marveled at the way even the children kept the complex rhythms locked to the voices, the joy filling up the space, and my heart lifted up in gratitude not only for the existence of God, but for the power of what He created here on Earth.

It is sometimes suggested that what I describe crosses into irreverence. It is called banal, feel-good, happy-clappy, and so on. People I deeply respect in all other areas use the word “beauty” to mean “high church,” unable (or refusing) to acknowledge that beauty crosses aesthetic lines, finding itself equally at home amid chant, praise bands, contemporary ensembles, solo cantors and classically-trained choirs.

Only in the constant frustration of trying to moderate the online rhetoric do I finally realize how blessed I was to grow up in a small, rural parish where there was little pretension and a great openness to all forms of beauty in music (even though, being a small parish, we were incredibly limited in what we could do). It wasn’t until much later that I realized how strongly so many people equate God with solemn, humorless sternness. I’ve never understood it. Why must reverence equal silence, holiness equal formality? Why do we shush children, try to make them behave (defined as sitting still and being silent, things utterly not in their nature, things which cause them to yell “church is boring” and help them not at all along the road toward understanding what’s going on and becoming active in participation)—why, when Jesus very clearly said “Let the little children come to me” and “whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it”? Why do we use worship as another venue to drive wedges between people, to separate them into groups that can be labeled “Us” and “Them”?

Don’t get me wrong. You know how I crave silence, how I find God in it. I think the lack of silence in modern life is a real problem, one that people are reluctant to address. And certainly I’m not suggesting that we should abandon the pomp and grandeur of high church. I know, without a doubt, that the ideal held up by the aforementioned people has real power to lift the heart to God, when it’s well done. But so do other forms. Look around the world. God created kangaroos and slugs, mountains and valleys and deserts and oceans, skin in black and white and all variations in between, and inspired people in all of them to create unique forms of beauty. How can we claim that there is only one way to worship the God who created such diversity? When any of us try to set up our own personal preferences (whatever form they take) as the only way or even the best way, we put God in a box.

Well, thank God He won’t stay in that box, that’s all I have to say.

What I experienced in that dream would be hard to achieve this side of Heaven. But it reminds me yet again that the human race, in all its diversity of custom and culture, truly is good.

Today I am grateful for all the things that support the song of the people of God:

hand drums and drumsets

electric guitars and keyboards

pipe organs and glorious trained choirs

chants and Renaissance polyphony (okay, so that last doesn’t support assembly song, but it can still lift our souls)

Handel and Haugen

Pope Gregory and Rich Mullins

for the inSpiration that touches all artists, whether they choose to make good use of it or not

for the constant renewal of the Church in the gifts of its members

for the constant tension between embracing what is good from contemporary culture and holding on to truth—however imperfectly the balance is held

for online arguments that remind me never to take for granted the blessings I’ve been given

Counting to a thousand with the Gratitude Community at A Holy Experience

Published in: on April 4, 2011 at 6:11 am  Comments (5)  
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Confessions of a National Anthem Singer

christina aguilera

Image by D.S.B via Flickr

I’ve been singing the national anthem at sporting events for six or seven years–on again, off again, depending on the state of my exhaustion level on the day of tryouts. And I’ve been a pastoral musician for two -plus decades, which means every time I get up to sing the anthem, I want nothing more than to start out by saying, “Please join in singing…”

On Super Bowl night, I was cooking sausages and onions in the kitchen when I heard Christina Aguilera flub up. “Did she just screw up the national anthem?” I said. I couldn’t believe it.

Our national anthem is hard to sing, with words that make no sense, and IMNSHO we ought to be singing something like America the Beautiful instead. However, that would take an act of Congress and we all know they’re too busy bickering about other things.

In the meantime, soloists routinely butcher songs that ought to belong to the everyone. For days after Obama’s inaugeration I couldn’t listen to news coverage, because everybody seemed so enthralled by Aretha’s performance that they played it over and over and over: “My coun…..(GASP, because it’s far more impressive if I only sing two syllables before I breathe!)…TRY ‘TIS of thee…”

It’s time to stop having soloists do these things altogether. The more life becomes a performance, the less engaged we are. And that’s a tragedy, because over time, as people’s opportunities to sing in community are pre-empted, they come to believe they can’t sing.

And because someone else has already written this argument more eloquently than I can, I direct you to the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s arts columnist, Sarah Bryan Miller. As she says, it’s time to take back the national anthem. And everything else, besides.

Published in: on February 8, 2011 at 8:08 am  Comments (11)  

Kate goes on a Christmas song rant

In honor of the season, I present:

Songs that should be banned from Christmas airwaves

  • Anything by the Beach Boys. I mean, no amount of jingle bells can make the Beach Boys sound Christmasy. It’s just annoying.
  • Most of the 96 million versions of “Feliz Navidad.” It’s not the song itself I object to, it’s proliferation of really hokey versions. Do they play them in a misguided attempt to appear multicultural?*
  • “Jingle Bell-(hiccup), Jingle Bell-(hiccup) Rock.” Hall & Oates have their place in pop history, but this version makes me want to run down the street shrieking in agony.
  • “I’ll ha-ave a-a Blue Christmas…” Need I say more?

For some reason I cannot fathom, at least one of these songs, and usually more, play every single time I turn on the radio. Of all the thousands of versions of hundreds of Christmas songs out there, every single station feels a need to play these three songs five to ten times a day  an hour. Can someone explain this to me?

Then there’s Rudolph. Julianna’s bus driver decorated her bus with red and green streamers and hung gold ornaments from the center. (We have an awesome bus driver.) She also perched a plush singing reindeer on the dashboard. Voila, Julianna has a new favorite song. She asks for it like this:

"Deer" in ASL

So I’ve been singing Rudolph several times a day hour for the last week or so. And being a song writer myself (albeit nowhere near as successful), every time I do, I gnash my teeth. What were you thinking, Johnny Marks? “Do you recall the most famous reindeer of all”? Come on, if we know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen, why would you even ask if we know the most famous reindeer of all?*

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that particular little bug off my chest, it’s your turn. What songs do you think need to be banished from the December airwaves?

*In posting, I discovered that Feliz Navidad has ITS OWN TAG on Word Press. What the…?????!!!!!

**Disclaimer: yes, I know it’s a song to introduce a reindeer nobody had ever heard of. Fully aware. Leave me alone. I’m ranting.

Published in: on December 8, 2010 at 6:14 am  Comments (14)  
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7 Quick Takes, vol. 104

240/365 National Novel Writing Month begins

Image by owlbookdreams via Flickr

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It’s officially National Novel Writing Month. Naturally, this means that this week I had two kids have days off school (different days–naturally) and an early out on a third.

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Nonetheless, I have written 4,268 words so far, and thankfully I got stopped by scheduling, not by dry creative wells. So although it’s going ve-ry sl-ow-ly, it is going. And that’s the point.

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G-flat major

Image via Wikipedia

While I was waiting for Alex at school yesterday, I spent a little time at the piano, fiddling with something I wrote down a few weeks ago. It’s in a brutal key (Eb minor) but I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I’m afraid most of you with enough musical knowledge to understand why that is a brutal key will simply say, “But Kate, just put it in a different key.” Are there any musicians out there who will back me up when I say that I just can’t, because it loses a major part of its beauty if I do? Key does make a difference. Each key has its own feel and quality to it. Eb minor is like dark chocolate and butter–rich and dark and haunting. Putting this in boring old D minor would strip it of what makes the melody special.

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Once in a while, someone will ask me, “What does it feel like to write something so beautiful?” I’ve never tried to answer that question before, but here’s my attempt: Humbling. It’s by no means a guarantee that simply sitting down at the piano and putting fingers to keys is going to result in something worthwhile. When I hear a beautiful melody, it amazes me as much as it amazes the people who ask the question. Hmm. I might need to blog on that topic sometime.

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We found out some crazy good news this week: Liguori is down to the last 800 or so copies of my book. Wow! Talk about humbling! I’m signing copies all weekend for the next three weeks at the local parishes, and going on the radio next week. I also talked to the editor of the diocesan paper yesterday (while Alex was running in and out with an apparently life-threatening, although completely invisible, boo-boo on his hand), and Christian is working on a placement in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as well. Oh yes, and don’t forget yesterday’s blog tour. Conventional Wisdom tells you that you’ll spend more time than you thought possible on promotion, but even though you believe it, it’s still hard to fathom when it becomes reality.

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Here’s a deep topic for the day. You might have noticed that gay issues are one of the few subjects on which I don’t pontificate here. That’s because it’s an issue on which I feel deeply conflicted. When what I believe to be true crashes into the reality of the gay Catholics I know, each of whom are deeply faith-filled people, I come up feeling that my beliefs are inadequate. This is not an invitation to try to convince me one way or another–only an introduction to this post from a woman with a gay son, which I think makes the difficulty of simple answers clear. I share it because I can’t help feeling that gay issues are a lot more gray than those of us who believe in Church teachings on sexuality would like them to be.

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Whew, that’s a lot of ground to cover for one Quick Takes post. I have to say, lately these are getting to be my favorite posts. I used to be looking for things to fill them; not so much anymore.

Have a great weekend!

7 quick takes sm1 7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 104)

Published in: on November 5, 2010 at 5:23 am  Comments (8)  
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Songbird

It’s been almost a year now since the moment I heard music peeking out from between the notes of a noodly warmup. It electrified my body, as a new melody always does, and with a hasty apology to my poor voice student, I hummed it out two or three times so I wouldn’t lose it before I had a chance to scribble it down.

I wrote the refrain within a couple of days, and then got stuck. Every so often, I’d return to it, banging on the wall of cliché’d ideas and trite truisms. I wrote a book about Advent. Several articles. Finished a novel. Began querying. Wrote another song, top to bottom. Started a new novel, a new book for Lent.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I went downstairs to revise a Mass setting at the request of the parishes who want to keep using it after the changes come down the pike next fall…and finally, the wall crumbled.

A finished song, ready to be put in the computer, ready to go winging out into the world to be sung, to be approved of or rejected. Enough to make a day worthwhile all by itself.

Linked to SteadyMom’s 30-minute blog challenge and

tuesdays unwrapped at cats

Published in: on August 31, 2010 at 6:18 am  Comments (7)  
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7 Quick Takes, the (mostly) link-a-doo version

Yes, I’ve got a lot of links today. But they’re awesome!

1. My kids are famous lately. Julianna and her PT got a writeup in the school of health professions’ magazine, (see pages 21-22), and the county electric coop did a writeup on a local farm, which Alex’s preschool class happened to be visiting on field trip. On page 2, he’s the one with the overall strap falling off his shoulder. On page 3–can’t miss him. What’s up with that face???

2. If you’re a mother of little girls, check out Hairbows For Life. I long to have a daughter I can gussy up. Someone please confirm what my head tries to reassure me–that even a typically-developing sweetie would pull hair bows out and hurl them everywhere?

4. Last night, while visiting blogs, I stumbled upon a site called “The Customer Is Not Always Right.” As a person who spent eight years working in the service industry under the motto The Customer Is Always Right, I couldn’t resist clicking. Absolutely hilarious! Please check it out. I promise it’s short.

5. Last night, I read this short blog entry from 5 Minutes for Special Needs. This was me last Mother’s Day, while Julianna was in the PICU. Except I was feeling a lot sorrier for myself than this woman.

5. I am pumped! I “finished” (***) a new song this week. Not the one I was trying to finish, mind you, but a song nonetheless. And in keeping with my current year-round focus on all things Advent/Christmas (my book is due out in the next month!), it is a song for Epiphany.
(***Note: The word “finished” is an arbirtrary one. In this case, it means I have a melody and a text, which may or may not get tweaked while I play the song several dozen times on piano, keyboard and Finale, trying out different accompaniments and choral parts and instrumental obbligatos. This is my favorite part of the composition process.***)

6. …

Mmmmmmmmmm......do I *have* to share?

7. Finally, considering Alex’s recent birthday party, I just want to share this gem from Legoland Chicago:

I am the Dark Knight. Do NOT mess with me!

Have a great weekend!

Published in: on May 14, 2010 at 5:37 am  Comments (8)  
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