Notes

In my second-grade classroom, on the windowsill, were plastic models of dinosaurs. These were interesting to me, but not as interesting as the clear plastic models of the regular solids and some other shapes. Of these, one especially captured my interest.
 
It was a clear plastic model of a cone. Intersecting the cone were transparent colored plastic planes. Each plane intersected at a different angle; one orthogonal to the axis, one at an angle less than the angle of the cone, one parallel to the axis, and one at the angle of the cone. Where these planes intersected the cone, they created a circle, ellipse, hyperbola, and parabola, respectively.
 
The whole thing was a complex jewel, in diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire. A beautiful thing, it also appealed to my nascent sense of precision and mathematical relationships. My classmates, budding paleontologists all, thought the dinosaurs were special. I thought the prisms, pyramids, polyhedra, and other geometric sculptures were the best things ever. But that cone was the best of the best.
 
The parabola is a wonderful shape; the path of a thrown ball, the shape of a telescope mirror. The "bola" part of the word is roughly cognate with "ball" -- the Greek word-inventors knew their metaphors. The "para" part means "beside" or "along with", like parallel lines.
 
The word "parable" comes from "parabola". One of the classical rhetorical terms refers to "parabolic speech", which is, of course, metaphoric. From "parable", the Romance languages get words for speaking; French "parler", Spanish "palaver", and such. Language is metaphor. All speech is parable. Come in to my parlor.
 
Words are symbols that represent things. Nouns are names of things; verbs are names of actions. With rare exceptions ("word") words are not the things themselves. It is this relation between the symbol and the thing that makes language what it is. It is the ability to associate meaning with symbols, and then manipulate the symbols, that gives language its power.
 
Jesus spoke in parables, sometimes. The parallel between the meaning of the stories and the application of that meaning to real life is similar to the relationship between words and their referents. We are left with symbols: the cross, the bread and wine, baptism.
 
As real as Jesus was and is, what I most often experience of Him is symbolic. Religious icons, practices, and words comprise much of my experience of Him. Rarely do I experience a feeling of person-to-person being-with.
 
I'm not sure, but I think this is right, at least for me, at least for now. Jesus is a parable, the word became flesh.

Saint Brennan the Navigator was a 6th century Irish monk. "The Voyage of Saint Brennan" is a fantastic tale of an odyssey he and a small group of followers took.

I have a friend who composes music. He says "I'm not a composer; I'm a songwriter." (Yes, he says it with a semicolon.) "What's the difference?", I ask. "A composer gets compared with Bach and Mozart, while a songwriter gets compared to Lennon and Dylan."
 
I'm a composer. For one thing, I don't do lyrics. Oh, I suppose I could, but they don't come easy, the way the music does. So I use other people's words. If that means I'm compared to Bach or Mozart, so be it.
 
So here's a hymn I composed recently. I actually wrote it for lyrics written by an internet friend, but here I've set Christmas lyrics to it. The lyricist here is William Chatterton Dix, who also wrote "What Child is This?" as part of a larger work, "The Manger Throne".

I upgraded to Sibelius 6 today. (That's my music-writing software.) To try it out, I pulled up a piece I wrote down in 2002 or so (but in my head for decades), and I re-worked it a little.

Here is an organ piece I wrote down a couple of years ago.
 
Most of my pieces don't have names, really; I just put titles on them so I can call them something. If they get lyrics, they inherit a name. In my head, each is just "the one that goes like this". So this is "Pie Jesu", because I had to name it.
 
I wrote this one down in 2007. I don't recall when it first came into my head. Our organist played it as the prelude for the Good Friday service in 2008.

Tonight, our church held its annual Music Sunday concert. This year's concert was called "Homegrown Hallelujahs" and featured original works and arrangements by members of the church. We played my arrangement of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" for handbell choir, and we did my original setting of "My Faith Looks Up to Thee".
 
The music for "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" is in the April 30th entry, below, although the live version sounds different from this computer-generated version. In the live version, the "bass" part is played on malleted bells and the "tenor" part is played on handchimes. Together, these parts comprise the "om-pah-pah", and the total effect imitates a ball-park organ about as well as metallophones can.
 
"My Faith Looks Up to Thee" is set to a piece that came into my head in 1973. The marriage with the hymn lyrics by Ray Palmer happened in the late 1980s. A couple of years ago, our music director asked me to add the oboe descant. My original music is very close to my heart, so much so that I have a hard time containing my emotions when it is performed. (My arrangements of other peoples' music do not affect me nearly as much.) This piece is especially emotional for me because my siblings and I sang it at my father's memorial service (without the oboe).
 
Here it is, in computer-generated form. There may be a recording of tonight's performance; if there is, I may be able to add it here, in a later entry. Meanwhile...

Is any unusual event a miracle?
 
Yesterday, I drove to Sacramento to visit my brother. He is the curator of The Aerospace Museum of California, and there's a new exhibit about space exploration that pays homage to the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
 
As I was driving north on 680, just south of Walnut Creek, doing about sixty-five miles per hour, I saw a bird fly up toward the passenger-side window. It was a pure white dove. It flew parallel to the car for several seconds, and looked in straight at me, then flew away.
 
Do let me know if you see a tongue of flame above my head, or if you can actually understand me.

Sometimes, I hear a song that needs to be written and shared. Upon learning about a friend's birthday, the phrase "Around the Sun" and this piece got into my head. This is not common; not often do they come with title or language-based leitmotif, but this one did.
 
The 5/4 meter is not surprising, though. Odd meters are not odd to me. But brass ensemble is not my normal musical millieu, and I don't know the idioms, so the notation may be irregular and perhaps even ungrammatical. I can't tell, because I don't know enough to be able to discern whatever might be at variance with standard practice.

A friend asked me to arrange this old favorite for bell choir, so I did.

A week ago, I played the prelude at my niece's wedding, in Peoria, Arizona. The prelude was supposed to last ten minutes, but it lasted forty minutes. I played my entire setlist twice, plus some other repertoire.
 
Here's a video: