When you are making out your Christmas card list this year, please consider including the following:

A Recovering American Soldier
c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center
6900 Georgia Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20307-5001

Last Sunday, Tom Honderich and Tim Jensen updated the congregation at the forum following the service on the Cornerstone Campaign and other activities in the church.

Pledges for the campaign total $686,000. To date, we have collected $110,000. The Steering Committee will stay in place to report regularly on progress and provide updates in a quarterly newsletter.
 
Tim reported that the stainglass panels have been installed and that the refurbished organ console will be installed in January. We will be without an organ for two to three weeks during installation.

Skylight repairs have been moved up in priority due to major leakage. Estimates are expected to be $3,000 to $5,000 higher than we budgeted, although there are some overages built into the campaign budget.
 
A new committee is in place to assist with budgeting. The Diocese is decreasing our assistance $5,000 for 2008. If we increase our contributions by cost of living, we will cover the loss of the diocesan assistance. However, we will not be able to cover the additional $13,000 we have budgeted for office assistance.

One of the books on my summer reading list was “This is your Brain on Music” by Daniel Levitin. I happened to be in the middle of it when a friend of mine, returning from church, complained about the organ prelude that morning. I believe her description was that it was just a “cacophony.” I asked her if it was just poorly played or if it was the music she didn’t like. Quickly she jumped to the defense of the organist, but produced a bulletin which attributed the prelude to Nadia Boulanger and identified the piece as “Improvisation.” Nadia Boulanger was a familiar name to me. I associated her with the great French organists of the last century, but I didn’t know anything more. Later I googled her and found out that she was probably the most significant teacher of composition of the last century. She taught most of the great 20th century American composers - Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Philip Glass, Ned Rorem, and even Burt Bacharach. She studied with Widor and Fauré. So, obviously, we were not dealing with a matter of credentials. I began to suspect that the problem was on the reception end, and the book I was reading gave me some clues why some music doesn’t connect sometimes.

Now, it isn’t that my friend doesn’t appreciate classical music. She loves Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and just about anybody up to the 20th century. It seems to be true of every generation that the music of our own time is harder to get our arms around. (I haven’t forgotten that we are in the 21stt century—but I’m still trying to cope with the last century.) Have you noticed that if a conductor programs a modern work as the last piece of a concert, the hall clears out during the intermission? It is sometimes hard work to sit through a piece that takes work to listen to.

We learn to listen to music in much the same way we learn to speak – from cultural cues, from repetition, from emotional inflection. Levitin says, “All of us have the innate capacity to learn the linguistic and musical distinctions of whatever culture we are born into, and experience with the music of that culture shapes our neural pathways so that we ultimately internalize a set of rules common to that musical tradition.” What I get from this is that we become programmed with certain musical expectations based on what we have been exposed to. Take for instance the scale. We who grew up in the western music tradition, whether we are aware of it or not, are programmed to expect whole steps and half steps to come in a certain order. Think of the “Sound of Music” and “Do-Re-Me….” Other cultural standards place the whole and half steps in different places and the resulting scale sounds strange and unnatural to us, and our tonality sounds weird to them. We anticipate how things are supposed to sound based on what we are programmed to hear. Our brains fill in the blanks. But, if something unusual happens along the way, our brains tell us something is wrong, unpleasant, or unexpected. What pressure this must be on composers! If all beauty is the fulfillment of what our brains expect, then there must be terrible pressure not to do anything revolutionary - nothing new. Yet, we do expect an artist to tweak the expected so that we see or hear something new. If we only hear the expected, boredom sets in.

Last week I was at the ISO and heard the first Ravel piano concerto for the first time. Granted, Ravel shouldn’t be too much of a challenge 70 years after it was written. It occurred to me during the mysteriously beautiful second movement that there was a time when I would have been convinced that the English Horn and the piano were not playing from the same score – other than the fact they ended at the same time and resolved into the same key. But, it didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I found it hauntingly beautiful.

Ultimately, I believe the problem is not with the music, but with our exposure to it. Music like language requires familiarity in order to be appreciated. So the next time Jason plays something challenging and not so “soothing” for a postlude, why not ask him what was going on in that piece? Why did he think it was important? What did you miss? Where was the beauty? What was the composer saying? How did it make you feel?

— Tom Honderich