At the Foot of the Cross, Volume 1 - by Various Artists

There is a disc that came out in the early 90's that is back in regular rotation on my mp3 player: At the Foot of the Cross, Volume 1. This magical little album prominently features members of The Choir and their circle of artists - Mike Knott, Phil Keaggy, Victoria Williams, Bob Bennett, and many many others -- including the late Mark Heard. It is mostly comprised of contemporary renditions of classic hymns, along with some neo-traditional renditions of the Catholic Mass and a couple rather trippy original tunes. It is astonishingly beautiful. That Mark Heard track is for my money THE highlight of this disc - a somber yet uplifting rendition of the Samuel Medley hymn "My Redeemer Lives."

Now I am not a Christian, though at the time this disc came out, I was quite devout. And at the time, this was my "desert island" disc -- if I were only allowed one more CD for the rest of my life it would be this one. That would have been around 1990 or so. Now, almost 20 years later, it's still in the top 10 for sure.

"Why?" you may ask "is such an overtly religious album still so special for you?"

Honestly, many religious works are still very special to me, the works of long gone classical composers notwithstanding (Handel's Messiah et al). But one of the things that I have come to learn in my post-Christian life is that I am allowed to like Christian works -- in the same way that I was allowed to enjoy non-Christian works when I was a Christian. It remains meaningful even though the literal meaning is not one that I still hold to. It is still a beautiful work of sonic art, no matter what it's about.

One of my favorite atheist thinkers, Daniel Dennett, gets a real kick out of putting people into groups and giving them provocative names. He divides us into "brights" (those who do not believe in a supernatural world) and "supers" (those that DO believe in a supernatural world). Now, Dennett has also divided the "Supers" into further categories:

• Those that believe their religion to the letter
  
• Those that secretly, deep down, do not truly believe in God
  
• and Murkies - those that choose to believe in the Mystery of God or the supernatural and so forth
  

...and in my time, I was a Murky.

I used to stay up all night as a late teenager on Christmas Eve, contemplating the Incarnation of Jesus. Never told anyone I did this, it was own private ritual - complete with sleep deprivation and ritual prayer.

Easter is always calculated on the lunar calendar, so every year, the (nearly) full moon was right outside my bedroom window. And again, I would stay up all night on the night before Easter, watching the moon and contemplating the resurrection.

I used to hold a private communion service in my home on Good Friday as well. These events were small, but well-attended. At my last of these bread & wine soirees (featuring John Coltrane's "Love Supreme"), I basically confessed that I didn't believe anymore -- the words just came out of me. I certainly didn't mean to say it.

Two weeks later I was out for good. And the things that I missed the most as a new atheist were these private personal rituals. It felt silly to continue them, but I had such an attachment to that feeling of Mystery - there was a legitimate grieving over losing them. But that was a long time ago.

I have grown up quite a bit since and don't have much really to prove. I am secure in my outlook on life and I don't mind a bit if I choose to listen to the Christian music of my teenage years. Some of it was very good - and At the Foot of the Cross, Vol. 1 is some beautiful music of the highest order. It gives me my guilty Murky pleasure - delivering ritual, spookiness, and sheer beauty. I recommend it to all.

For those interested in ordering it, you can download it here for the bargain price of $7.90.

Thanks!

Why I Write Songs with Nonsense Syllables, Part Two

In an earlier post, I revealed the spiritual side of why I like to write music with nonsense syllables for lyrics. For those too lazy to scroll down I will sum up: there are ways to communicate meaning and emotion beyond simple diction. But there is another reason that I enjoy singing these nonsensical phonemes: the sheer love of phonetics. But let me back up.

Oscar Wilde famously said in the prologue to The Picture of Dorian Grey that "from the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician." Or to rephrase, music is almost unique among the arts in that it doesn't have to be about something to be enjoyable. Many of the most famous musical works in western culture have numbers in place of names, and we think nothing of it -- Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, et al. As western culture went through its romantic period, musicians went to great lengths to inject meaning into their music - with Berlioz even writing a text to accompany his magnum opus, Symphonie Fantastique. But I cannot help but notice that my favorite contemporary composer, Steve Reich, has reverted back to the masters in his nomenclature: Music for 18 Musicians, Eight Lines, Six Marimbas, Cello Counterpoint, etc.

I referred to music as being "almost unique." And believe me; it pains me to use the word "unique" in a non-absolute fashion. But it is interesting to note that in the wake of the two world wars nearly ALL the artists of all media began trying to take meaning OUT of their works. Kandinsky (arguably the first truly abstract painter) interestingly named many of his paintings with musical terms like "composition" or "improvisation."

Now, I had said something about phonetics?

My childhood utterances were riddled with me using the word that I thought fit phonetically better than the real word. I used the word "physique" when I meant "exquisite" for example -- it just sounded better. Once in the fourth grade, the teacher asked us to say what came to mind when we heard the word "tragedy." When it was my turn, I said I thought of "strategy" -- and the looks I got I will never forget! But DUUUHHHH -- the two words sound so alike, how could you NOT think of "strategy!?" Probably the most embarrassing example of this was when I made my own homemade kite (I was eight or nine) and I wanted to say something like "The Amazing Mark Allender" on it. But "amazing" didn't cut it. I needed to be better than amazing. The "EnDURing" Mark Allender?" No. Not that either. But I liked that "OOR" sound -- that was cool. Then I hit on the perfect word, and colored in big letters across my kite, "THE MANURE MARK ALLENDER." I was so proud and showed my mother, who tried not to burst into laughter as she explained to me what manure was.

Fast forward to 2004. I was playing in a band called The Brothel Brothers with my friends David Badagnani and John Kuegeler. We were a hot little trio - accordion, trumpet, and bass - and our shtick was that we would take songs from all over the world and transpose them for these three instruments. Some were easy -- such as our Cajun tune, "`Tit Galop Pour Mamou" or our Norwegian tune "Hopparen." Others were more challenging, such as our Iraqi tune "Zajal" or the Zulu pop song "Umfazi Omdala." But this was the first time that I found myself singing a vast number of songs in other languages, many of which had nothing to do with one another linguistically. It was hard to tell what the songs were about just from the music -- that Zulu tune for example has a joyful sounding major key progression, but the lyrics translate as "Old Woman, why are you beating that small child? I will chase you away!" But here's the kicker. No matter what the songs were about, they were FUN TO SING! And that was a big part of the cool of the Brothel Brothers -- pure phonetic joy unencumbered by semantics. Taken as a body of work, many of the tunes were like abstract paintings. Fun at the most aural level.

So this too is something that I want to explore further: the simple joy of phonetics in music. To sing with conviction about nothing. What I am discovering is that acappella music lends itself to this kind of thing very well. Since there is no guitar or piano undergirding the melody, phonetics are a fantastic way to provide musical texture - a technique explored in my songs "Glacitu" and "Demeda Seng Set" for example. Other tunes such "The Accuser" have the English verses as the texture with a glossolalia melody on the top.

It's still very much a work in progress. I am shooting to have this thing done by early spring. We'll see where it takes me!

^{The Brothel Brothers website}

A Meditation On Evil

I am pleased to report that I recently had the experience of watching (with my daughter) a DVD of the 1986 made-for-TV film, My Little Pony & The End Of Flutter Valley. My daughter loved it - I endured it as well as I could. Just to give you a plot summary, the Ponies are going across the meadow to see their friends The Flutter Ponies -- little tiny ponies with butterfly wings and high squeaky voices) in order to observe the annual Flutter Pony Celebration.

BUT...

There are three witches who hate laughter and joy and flowers and sunshine and rainbows, So they want to RUIN the celebration! And they nearly succeed - but at the last minute, the Ponies recover the Magic Sparkle Gem, which restores the celebration! And the witches end up in a big mud puddle. It's that classic "pony vs. witch" conflict so common in contemporary literature. Practically unwatchable. It is certainly not for the weak.

But those witches now. For those up on their literary criticism, they will recognize the witches as embodiments of the Iago character type, so named by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a character who acts out of pure malice with no ulterior motivation. Those that have actually read Othello will notice that this actually isn't true -- Iago is wreaking havoc on Othello and Desdemona out of revenge - he was denied a promotion. A little over the top as far as revenge goes -- but even the original Iago is not really the true embodiment of the Iago character type. You only find that kind of malice in a children's story.

Similar characters can be found in other cartoons fromn the 1980's. Take the 1970's - 1980's version of the SuperFriends. You have your Hall of Justice with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc. And you have your Legion of Doom with Braniac, Bizarro, Solomon Grundy, Lex Luthor, and so forth. And the Legion of Doom is not interested in drugs or money or power. They just do bad things -- they plot to make a volcano erupt and destroy a town. Things like that. Or take the Smurfs - Gargumel is not after the smurfs' land, or their magical secrets or anything. And he is not interested in revenge. He just hates Smurfs and wants to exterminate them.

Exterminate. The "E" word. Echoes of Hitler reverberate when you use the "E" word - and Hitler is among the biggest and baddest embodiments of evil. Was he an example of pure unadulterated malice? Well, no, he wasn't actually. The systematic extermination of twelve million people - six million among them being Jews - is a horrific crime. But as staggering as the Holocaust was, scholars agree that it was only a side project. Or more specifically, a means to an end - that end being world domination. That particular flavor of evil was a lust for power.

A harder case against "pure evil" is to be made of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers. They DO seem like a very real Gargumel-like threat. They want to kill us. And near as we can tell, we haven't done anything to deserve it. Osama bin Laden himself has given numerous reasons for his own mission against us. US foreign policy is often given as a reason. Our stance on Israel. Interestingly in one speech, bin Laden cites his antics as revenge for the defeat of the Turks in a battle at the end of the Ottoman Empire. And this event - whatever it was - is so removed from the consciousness of the average American that I can't even find it with the cursory web search I am willing to give it.

But we are talking martyrdom here - and that is a very different kettle of fish. It could be argued that martyrdom like that committed by the 9/11 terrorists is in fact the ultimate in evil since even the perpetrator's own life is insignificant in the commission of murder and destruction. They get nothing out of it. But even leaving aside the promise of an afterlife that would make Hugh Hefner blush, there is another big payoff to martyrdom. It is something I will describe in another post, but for the moment I will say only this: human beings are the only creatures on the planet who are willing the give up their lives for ideas -- be they the service of God, or democracy, or for love, for country, for honor. And I will postulate for the moment that we DO get something out of it when we behave like this¹.

So if I haven't been clear, let me be so now. Pure evil does not exist. Evil acts are performed only as a means to an end. Man kills man for revenge, for power, for prestige, or even - in the case of serial murderers - for the thrill. Evil is the baddest of all side projects, but it is always collateral damage.


^{1. http://forum-network.org/lecture/daniel-dennett-evolution-free-will-and-morality}