…and as of next Saturday, 2 June, I will be in Washington, D.C. until 30 June or when my wife goes into labor, whichever comes first. If that’s your neck of the woods and want to hang out, let me know.

The desk is here: http://bloomington.craigslist.org/fuo/3005587538.html

Everything else is here: http://www.amazon.com/shops/leitourgeia

Do take a look. If there’s something you see that you want or have any questions or anything like that, drop me a line at rrbarret AT indiana DOT edu.

I’ve continued to chew on some of the implications of that post, and one of the outcomes of that was to draft a proposed curriculum for what a Byzantine chant concentration could look like in the context of an undergraduate music program. Obviously, this is all entirely hypothetical; I don’t know of any music schools that are itching to add this as a concentration. St. Katherine’s College could, I suppose, eventually try to incorporate something like this into their curriculum, but who knows. Hellenic College would probably be reasonably well set-up to do something like this, but they don’t even presently offer a music major.

A few assumptions I’m making: first and foremost, that there is an on-campus chapel with regular services. Second, that chapel services would make a full-on recital unnecessary; rather, have the student do a junior and senior exam that basically are an extended jury — where they prepare a certain number of compositions ranging in difficulty and sing 2-3 of them at the request of a committee. Third, that building a good cantor who is also a good musician will require some knowledge of Western music theory and notation (I’m less sold on keyboard skills, but it still seems instinctive to me to include) in addition to Byzantine music theory and notation. Fourth, that voice lessons won’t concentrate on things like “Caro mio ben” or “Silent Noon”. They may well include that kind of repertoire if the student really wants it and the teacher is able to do it, but beyond the universals of healthy production, the specifics will by and large be those of psaltic technique. Fifth, that the academic environment would be such that it would allow for patristic and theological discussion to occur within the context of music history courses.

One observation I make immediately is that this is a very full undergraduate degree. I started off with IU’s B. Mus. in Vocal Performance as a basis, while also consulting their Early Music Vocal Performance B. Mus., and then worked from there to focus it specifically on the requirements of Byzantine chant. As with IU’s Vocal Performance B. Mus., the general education requirements are quite minimal, but it’s still jam-packed. I think the keyboard skills part could perhaps be taken out/made an elective, maybe a case is made for 2 languages rather than three, and maybe you either don’t do credits for Chapel Choir or tweak the number of credits for voice lessons. But, all that said, the B. Mus. at IU is a very full degree, and that’s just how it is.

It seems that a couple of other useful curricula to come up with would be a B. A. degree, and perhaps a more general “Orthodox Liturgical Music” degree. It’d be nice to also include a course or two on Mediterranean folk music to be able to show the relationship between liturgical and vernacular musics (hinted at in the bit about “Mediterranean instruments”, which also assumes that such instruction would be available), but maybe that would have to be kept for the Masters degree.

Anyway, here’s the draft. I’m curious to hear thoughts.

–

Bachelor of Music in Performance, Byzantine Chant

Major Ensemble

Chapel Choir (1 cr.) required every semester of enrollment.

Performance Study

Voice. 3 credit hours each semester until senior exam is passed, at which point they may be reduced to 2. Required: entrance audition, freshman jury, upper-division examination, junior exam, senior exam.

Secondary Piano and Keyboard Proficiency

All students must pass a keyboard proficiency examination. Voice majors must take an examination for placement in a 3-semester class piano sequence (2 credits per semester) or take elective individual lessons (1-2 credits per semester) and continue study each semester until the keyboard proficiency examination is passed.

Core Music Courses

26 credit hours

• Placement examination or Introduction to Musical Concepts (1 cr.)
• Core Musical Skills I (1 cr.), Western Music Theory and Literature I (3 cr.)
• Western Music Theory and Literature II (3 cr.)
• Western Musical Skills II (1 cr.)
• Byzantine Musical Skills I (1 cr.)
• Byzantine Musical Skills II (1 cr.)
• Byzantine Music Theory and Literature I (3 cr.)
• Byzantine Music Theory and Literature II (3 cr.)
• Byzantine Music Theory and Literature III (3 cr.)
• History and Literature of Western Music (3 cr.)
• History and Literature of Byzantine Music I (2 cr.)
• History and Literature of Byzantine Music II (2 cr.)

The above must be passed with a C or better.

Advanced Music Literature and Music Theory

3 credit hours selected from:

• Composer or Genre (3 cr.)
• Topics in Byzantine Music Theory (3 cr.)
• Pre-Reform Notation (3 cr.)
• Analysis of Modal Music (3 cr.)

Other Music Courses

25 credit hours

Required:

• Liturgics & Chant Literature: Services and Service Structure I (3 cr.)
• Liturgics & Chant Literature: Services and Service Structure II (3 cr.)
• Liturgics & Chant Literature: Idiomela I (3 cr.)
• Liturgics & Chant Literature: Idiomela II (3 cr.)
• Liturgics & Chant Literature: Anastasimatarion and Irmologion (3 cr.)
• Applied Greek Diction for Singers (1 cr.)
• Applied Arabic Diction for Singers (1 cr.)
• Applied Romanian Diction for Singers (1 cr.) OR Applied Slavonic Diction for Singers (1 cr.)
• English Diction for Singers (1 cr.).
• Electives: 6 credit hours, including a minimum of 2 credit hours in pedagogy courses such as Introduction to Music Learning (2 cr.) or Vocal Pedagogy (3 cr.).

Electives may also include courses for music majors in sacred music, music education, techniques, conducting, composition, music history, music theory, opera, and unclassified courses. A maximum of 4 credit hours in early or Mediterranean instruments may be counted in this area.

General Education

23-35 credit hours

• Written and Oral Expression English composition, 2 credit hours or competency.
• Foreign Language 12-24 credit hours or proficiency, equivalent to two semesters of first-year language study.
  • Greek: Elementary Ecclesiastical Greek I (4 cr.) and Elementary Ecclesiastical Greek II (4 cr.); or Accelerated Ecclesiastical Greek (4 cr.).
  • Arabic: Elementary Arabic I (4 cr.) and Elementary Arabic II; or Accelerated Elementary Arabic (4 cr.).
  • Choice of:
  • Romanian: Elementary Romanian I (4 cr.) and Elementary Romanian II (4 cr.); or Accelerated Elementary Romanian (4 cr.). OR
  • Slavonic: Elementary Church Slavonic I (4 cr.) and Elementary Church Slavonic II (4 cr.); or Accelerated Church Slavonic (4 cr.)
• Humanities 3 credit hours.
• Life and Physical Sciences and Mathematics 3 credit hours.
• Social and Behavioral Sciences 3 credit hours.

To Complete Degree

Free music or non-music electives as needed to bring the total credit hours to 120, excluding Chapel Choir.

The bottom line was that, for that last summer before college, I really didn’t want to go to Alaska and they really didn’t want me to stay in Seattle. I had no desire to go someplace that I had no real memory of to be around two people who were likely to re-negotiate the manner of their life together after a year apart in a way that was going to be extremely unpleasant for any additional parties. If the point was for me to work, I could do that in Seattle without paying for a plane ticket; from where I sat, that made a heck of a lot more sense than forcing me to be a continuing participant in their drama. I had people I wanted to be around, but that was also part of the issue for my parents; they weren’t people they wanted me to be around. There’s not much more I can say about that without getting into specifics that aren’t appropriate for me to get into, so I’ll leave this by noting that I had a conversation with one parent where I expressed all of my concerns quite openly; this parent replied, well, yes, that’s all probably true. It isn’t going to be fun, and you’re probably going to have to deal with us fighting a lot. But that’s the way it goes, we’re a family, messed up though we may be, this is the way we want it for you right now, and we’re still in charge.

This was a growing source of tension as high school graduation neared; ultimately, however, there were two things that threw a wrench into the plan for me to be in Alaska for the entire summer — one was early orientation for Western Washington University, and the other was the aforementioned opportunity to work as an extra on the movie Mad Love. Again, don’t bother looking for me; everything I was in was cut. I could have worked more, but the three days I did work meant a two week delay in my departure for Alaska, and my parents weren’t willing to delay it any more. Still, as it worked out, I had to be back a month later anyway for early orientation and registration. The schedule became a month up, three weeks back, and a month up.

Yes, the time in Anchorage was rough, for all of the reasons I expected it to be. However, I will be the first person to say that there are parts of it I’m glad for; I had the chance to reconnect with some family members I hadn’t seen in years, and I was able to continue some of my vocal momentum with a voice teacher named Bettyrae Easley, who did the very practical thing of getting me ready to audition for Western’s music major, something in the post-graduation whirlwind that there just hadn’t been time to discuss with Dennis once my voice had finally opened up. Among other things, Bettyrae taught me my first French mélodie, Fauré’s “Lydia”, which served as my introduction to an entirely new song paradigm (to say nothing of the beginning of a, shall we say, complex relationship with French diction).

I did wind up working a bit in Anchorage; not overly much due to the time constraints, but there were a couple of odd jobs here and there that I did for friends of my dad. Among other things, I helped a future protest candidate for the United States Senate and right-wing filmmaker move out of a landmark Lloyd Wright home, and I also spent a couple of weeks assembling and finishing ulus.

One of the things that was difficult for me conceptually about preparing to go to college was that nobody seemed to actually have a clear idea in their head why I was going, or how to relate it to anything I was interested in doing, or how to relate any of those things to how I might actually earn a living on the other end. I was supposed to have been a smart kid, but none of the various things I was good at really lent themselves to careers, per se, at least as my parents or the people in their circles understood them. I was a voracious reader, I retained information, I read about all kinds of things as a kid from astronomy to cryptography to computer science to paleontology to mythology and everything in between, but what did that mean in terms of what I could do to feed myself? Coming into high school, math and science bored me silly, I hated sports, I was more interested in what computers could be used for than what they did under the hood, I enjoyed creative writing, I seemed to have some aptitudes for drawing and painting up to a point, and I enjoyed music but puberty had freaked me out with my voice change and I convinced myself I couldn’t sing anymore. There really wasn’t anything obvious in there in terms of “normal” career paths; not business, not medicine, none of that. Neither of my parents finished college and academia wasn’t anything I had ever heard of as a career.

Once I got into high school and discovered that I seemed to have an aptitude for theatre and music, that was a relief in some respects and it gave me some idea of a path. The thing was, nobody took it seriously. I remember my senior year of high school telling people, I’m going to major in music and theatre. Typically, that would generate a condescending smile and a sentence that sounded something like, “Oh, well, it really doesn’t matter what you start with, because you’ll probably change ten times before you’re done.” That, frankly, pissed me off; it was clear that I was being patronized and not listened to. At the same time, I had to acknowledge that having it in my head that I would finish a major wasn’t the same thing as knowing exactly how to get to the “pay your bills” part of the deal.

My parents didn’t know what to tell me. They didn’t really understand my interests, and they didn’t have any advice regarding college except get good grades and finish as soon as possible. Neither was there was ever any clear idea of what the trajectory of life post-high school was going to be for us, even before they moved back to Alaska. Was there an expectation that I was going to live with them until I got married? Was there an expectation about when it would be “okay” for me to think about getting married? None of this was discussed. At least when they were still going to be in Seattle, some small level of continuity could be assumed, but the mechanics and specifics still weren’t really talked about. After the move, all bets were off.

Thus it was that I found myself in Bellingham in September of 1994, living in a dorm room in Ridgeway Sigma with one Will Bass, and most of my worldly possessions were under my then-girlfriend’s house (many of which never to be seen again, alas, as will be explained in a future installment). I auditioned for the voice major, got in, then walked over to the other side of the Performing Arts Center and declared myself a theatre major. My very first class on the first day of my freshman year was Music Theory I, taught by Prof. Jeffrey Gilliam (to this day perhaps the single most naturally musical person I have ever met, to say nothing of the very best music theory instructor I have ever had). It was off to the races.

There were a number of highlights to that year: I was in my very first opera, singing Marco, one of i parenti in Gianni Schicchi (with the previously-mentioned future Metropolitan Opera baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson in the title role). I also got to sing the high baritone drunken abbot solo in Carmina Burana (“Ego sum abbas Cucaniensis… WAAAAAAAAAAAAFNA!”). My friend Gavin Shearer sat me down at some point in the fall to show me this awesome thing that was happening in computers called “the World Wide Web” that used this amazing program called Mosaic to do what Prodigy and AOL had utterly failed to do up to that point. Two portentous occurrences: a master class with a voice teacher named Roy Samuelsen from Indiana University, a school I had never heard of before but that apparently had quite a reputation for opera, and dating very briefly this lovely brunette named Megan McKamey, who was absolutely wonderful in every way, but everything going on around me made it difficult to feel capable of committing at the level I felt she deserved.

The trouble was, my parents and I didn’t even get through the first quarter without some massive meltdowns. The situation was complex; Seattle was still home for me, and I would go back on the weekends, because I felt very much alone at Western. My parents didn’t want Seattle to continue to feel like home for me, since from their perspective I needed to start thinking of Anchorage as home, but from where I sat they had moved, not me; I was just following the plan we had always had, and… yeah. The whole situation had nowhere to go but down. At some point it was suggested that maybe the whole idea of me going to college at Western was no longer tenable, and that marked the point where the irreconcilable differences in how we saw what was happening meant that there was basically no reasonable conversation to be had about anything. There was a brief period of rapprochement over spring break; my paternal grandmother passed away, and my dad and I spent the week together while he cleaned out her condo. Still, once summer came and I made it clear I wasn’t going back to Alaska, whatever brief peace had been achieved was broken. “In ten years you’re going to remember this moment as the day you pissed your life away,” I recall being told on the phone. What drove me absolutely batty about all of this was how inevitable it had all seemed from the time my dad had announced that he was going back to Anchorage, and everything was happening exactly as I had feared it would. Nobody had listened to me, and somehow I was being blamed for it. The stress made me a charmer to deal with, I’m sure; certainly it impacted a number of relationships I valued, but there just wasn’t anything I could do. I wasn’t equipped to deal with any of it, and I had no particular support system to fall back onto.

That summer I worked at Computer City, sold the first copy of Windows 95 at midnight of 24 August 1995 (there used to be a photo online of me ringing it up, not sure where it might be found these days), and took voice lessons from Dennis Kruse. We were working on preparing me for opera auditions at Western in the fall — the opera was Marriage of Figaro, not exactly a huge tenor show, but Basilio would be worth it for a kid like me. “O wie ängstlich” from Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio was the audition piece we worked up, and Dennis put me as the last singer on his summer studio recital, even over some of his students who were ostensibly his stars and who had made it clear much of the time I had worked with Dennis that they thought I was a waste of his time.

Sophomore year wasn’t exactly an amazing improvement over freshman year. A high school friend and his mother — J. P. had been the Danny Zuko in Grease! and Tony in West Side Story, and was also a student of Dennis Kruse — were killed in a car crash in the fall, which led to a reunion nobody particularly wanted. Fallout from that, plus still trying to figure out how to resolve the family situation, meant that I was even more of a wreck that year than I had been my freshman year. I agreed to spend the holidays and the following summer in Alaska, hoping that it would ease off some of the tension, but if anything, it ratcheted it up.

Marriage of Figaro was fun, but it was a bizarre reconstruction/translation that basically turned it into musical theatre — the recitatives were replaced with spoken dialogue from the Beaumarchais play. There were a number of practical reasons to do this, I suppose; hiring a harpsichordist and having the time to coach the recits properly being two of the major concerns, as I understand it. They had piddled away the fall quarter with a lot of political nonsense over sets and casting professionals for Figaro and the Count in one of the casts, and didn’t even post the cast list until sometime towards the end of the quarter, even though auditions had been in September and the performances were set for March. It was a strange experience all around.

I wound up in Alaska three weeks before the end of the quarter. I was supposed to work for my mother’s company over the summer, and they had revised their policies sometime in the spring so that everybody for the summer needed to be in place by 1 May. “So, you’ll just have to come up here early,” I was told. Um, the school year isn’t over? Not even close? “The opportunity cost of you finishing the quarter isn’t worth it. Anybody with half a brain should be able to see that.” Did I mention that I was a first generation college graduate?

I negotiated what I could with my professors (which in some cases, meant taking Fs). I can’t say I exactly made myself popular with anybody during this time, and not for no reason. I was a basketcase through and through, and nothing I was trying to do seemed to work out in a straightforward fashion. Going to college right out of high school had turned into a disaster; I was unprepared for it, my parents were unprepared for it, additional circumstances meant that there was additional burden for all of us to bear, and my friends were unprepared for how unpleasant of a person the whole experience was making me.

Summer of 1996 I cannot describe in much detail without going into things that I’d rather not discuss publicly. Suffice it to say that I got a front row seat for much of why my parents were freaked out over me being 2,500 miles away; a lot of the unpleasantness that had been plaguing our family life since the mid-1980s had come home to roost with their move, we were all now having to confront it head on, and none of us were doing a particularly good job. I returned to Bellingham in September unsure of what kind of a relationship would be possible with my parents after certain events, conversations, and revelations. I focused on what I could, namely, trying to rebuild my relationships at Western.

In short, however, that ship had sailed, and now I had to sleep in the bed of frustrations I had made the previous two years. Whatever had been the cause of all my erratic behavior, certain relationships were damaged beyond repair, and I continued to make unhealthy decisions with respect to other relationships. I couldn’t find a way to focus on being at school, partially because the muddied reasons I had for being there continued to get muddier, partially because all of my personal issues made it impossible to ever feel sufficiently centered and stable. I also made some poor choices vocally — Dennis had gone to a lot of trouble to figure out how to work much of the tension I usually carried with me out of my voice, a wonderful teacher named Virginia Hunter had done a very nice job teaching me to sing with the instrument Dennis had shown me I’d had, but that year, for reasons that seemed great at the time, I switched to a teacher who went out of their way to work all of that tension back in. Within three months my top was completely gone and my voice had regained a strangled quality that I thought had been left behind after graduating high school.

There was one more factor in this equation. In fall of ’96, I became aware of some behavior on a faculty member’s part that I believed (and believe) to be unethical, and at the very least political maneuvering at the expense of students. I attempted to seek advice on how to deal with these things in a way which I thought to be private which instead publicly blew up in my face. Later, I understood that whatever my concerns were, the way I sought to deal with it was totally unprofessional on my part and embarrassing to the faculty member in question. This culminated in a letter from the chair of the department telling me that all three of us — he, the faculty member, and I — would likely be happier if I went someplace else. So, midway through winter quarter, so many threads having come unraveled, I decided that college had become a gigantic, expensive exercise in beating my head against a brick wall, and it was time to acknowledge that it just wasn’t the right thing for me to be doing at that moment. I subsequently dropped out in disgrace, with the straw that broke the camel’s back being something which really was entirely my own fault. Today I would deal with a similar situation very differently because I would understand better what was happening; the bottom line is that when someone’s on a tenure track, you either play along or get out of the way, particularly under circumstances where resources are scarce and only so many people can get what they want. Anyway, after flailing about for a few months and still making really bad decisions (almost reflexively, at this point), I started selling classified advertising for the Bellingham Herald and trying to figure out how I might be able to move back to the Seattle area.

1994-1997 was a difficult, unpleasant time. It is difficult to even know where to begin explaining that the poor, confused, unhappy person who arrived at WWU in the fall of 1994 was not me at my best, not by a long shot. I started college not having any idea which way was up and having nobody, really, to whom I could turn. I was trying to do everything right which I possibly could, but there was just very little good that anybody could do for me, and trying to do everything right when one doesn’t even know what all one needs to do means one is bound to get quite a bit wrong. There continue to be ramifications to this day — people who don’t talk to me because some of my choices, people who, even if they’re still friends with me, can get easily upset when discussing some of what happened, and other consequences. A few years later, I did my best to apologize to everybody I hurt in those years, with somewhat mixed results. Whenever I think about that period, it is with a lot of pain and regret, but also a lot of confusion. In broad strokes, under the circumstances, I have a hard time imagining what I could have done differently that would have been any better beyond, quite simply, dropping out earlier. The kind of wrench my parents’ move threw into the works was comprehensive, I had no idea how to deal with it, my parents had no ideal how to deal with it, and they had no ideal how to help me deal with it. In retrospect, maybe it would have been better for me to find a way to work full-time while doing an Associate’s degree at a community college and continuing to study with Dennis. The trouble with that, however, was that I didn’t really have a place to live available to me full-time. Moving to Anchorage would have cut me off from much of what I was trying to do post-high school, and would likely have only hastened the inevitable. Maybe I could have just taken a year off out of high school to figure things out — I was starting college at 17, after all, thanks to my skipped grade — but that wasn’t really presented as an option. The expectation had always been that I would go to a four year college right out of high school; it was exactly what I would do while I was there and what would happen after that were all quite vague.

I should note that there are a number of people from this time for whom I remain grateful: an incomplete list includes Brian Ward, Holly Zehnder, Mike Cook (memory eternal), Peter and Arwyn Smalley (née Moilanen), Suzann Miller (née Welch), Jon Haupt, JOHHHHHHHHHHHHN Davies, David Harsh, Jon Lutyens, Matthew Murray, Kai Morrison, Dennis Kruse, Tom and Jordin Baugh (née Peters), Matt Carter, Sue Fletcher, Sarah O’Brien (née Wright), Liz Holmes, Eric Rachner, and, of course, Flesh of My Flesh herself, Megan Barrett (née McKamey).

So, we’re less than two months out from the next generation coming into the world. It’s a little crazy, because Megan’s due date is 26 June, and starting 2 June I will be at Dumbarton Oaks for their Byzantine Greek Summer School, which goes through 30 June. We’re told that it’s not uncommon for first babies to be as much as 8 days past the due date, so it could be a total non-issue, but in any event, I’m glad to be living in an era where there are airplanes. My mom will be here in Bloomington starting 14 June, and Megan’s mom somewhere around the 25th, and the good people who run the program at DO tell me that I’m not the first person to be in this situation (I suppose with academics trying to plan babies for the summer, this isn’t all that uncommon) and of course I can leave if I have to leave and not worry about it. My advisor tells me that when he did the same program 12 years ago, he had to leave a week early to get married — “But I think you’ve got me beat,” he said. Anyway, yeah, it’s a little crazy, but what can you do except take a deep breath and pray for the best?

One of the things I’m looking forward to about being at DO is that the Greek cathedral is about a mile and a half away, and they have a new protopsaltis fresh from Greece as of last month. I’m hopeful that I can touch base with him while I’m there — we’ll see.

Anyway, as we prepare for oncoming baby, we have nascent registries at Target, Amazon, and MyRegistry.com, but if you go to any of them, you’ll see that there isn’t much there yet. The thing is, we really have no idea what we need. We don’t know if we’re having a boy or a girl (we’re being old-fashioned like that), and while we’ve gone to the stores and pushed things around, we don’t really know what we’re going to find useful in strollers or things like this.

So, I’m looking for suggestions, particularly if you’ve done the whole grad-school-with-baby thing. We live in a relatively small house, we’ve got books freaking everywhere, two cars, we live about a mile from campus, and the farthest away we go as a regular destination is church, which is 6 miles away. We’re both done with coursework, and while I’ll be on campus teaching next year, pretty much somebody will always be at home. Either Megan will be writing her dissertation, doing research assistant work for her advisor, or taking care of the baby; in my case, I’ll either be doing exam prep, grading for my class, or taking care of the baby. What are we going to need? What won’t we need? What will we not be able to live without? etc. Anybody out there who can be the voice of experience, I’m all ears.

So, where were we… I guess I had made an attempt at the end of my senior year to go back to the expression of Christianity proper to my Danish heritage, and then I graduated high school.

The summer after graduation was stressful and complicated. My parents’ move had left me without any real place I belonged; they wanted me in Anchorage with them for the summer, which isn’t really where I wanted to be. The details of that part of the story will have to be left for the next addendum, but the short version is that between going back and forth a bit between Alaska and Seattle, navigating various issues on how I’d actually start my freshman year at Western Washington University, and, well, starting my freshman year, whatever spiritual momentum I may have gained from my attendance at Northlake Lutheran completely dissipated. I was able to visit there once over the summer during one of the trips to Seattle, and talked to Pastor Chris about what was going on. “Well, we’re praying for you,” he said.

When I got to Bellingham, I had absolutely no idea what do in terms of churches. I was limited to my on-foot options, which weren’t fantastic. My evangelical friends were super-involved in The INN University Ministries, and I went once, but it was everything that had made me uncomfortable about Overlake’s high school group turned up to 11, with what struck me as a baffling appropriation of youth culture. (Keep in mind I felt this way and was articulating it more or less with these words at 17.) Why, oh why, would you use the Lemonheads’ “Into Your Arms” in the context of Christian worship? Was it supposed to make me want to sing along? Well, it didn’t, it made me look for the nearest door. Call me a grumpy old man beyond my years (and I’m sure some of my friends did), but I could only read it as pandering. I didn’t want to be pandered to, and as a teenager I really didn’t want to be pandered to as part of an interest group called “teenagers”. I wanted to be part of something that would transcend whatever concerns and tastes informed my latest mix tape, and I didn’t (and don’t) understand why that premise appeared to be overlooked at best and treated with hostility at worst. I joined a “care group” (now apparently called “small groups”) that was led by one of my INN friends who was a fellow voice major and former Dennis Kruse student, but beyond that I felt like there wasn’t a spiritual home for me in Bellingham. One aspect of this that perhaps might be predictable is that the more I was exposed to the masterpieces of sacred music as a singer in training, the more my discomfort with modern praise music was amplified.

I remember having a conversation with the same friend who had told me that I didn’t belong at Overlake. He was easily the best friend I had in those years (which is part of why I had to take his conclusion that I just didn’t fit in there so seriously, and why it kind of stung), he also wound up at Western, and he was heavily involved in the INN. He provided continuity for me that was vital, and we talked about a lot of the Big Things in those early college days. I was talking to him about lacking any kind of a spiritual home — not a new conversation topic between the two of us, obviously — and he, as per usual, didn’t understand why I couldn’t just adapt to Protestant America’s cultural norms. For him, there was a fundamental assumption that that’s what “real Christianity” looked like for most normal people, so what made me so special that I couldn’t deal with it? My points about transcendence didn’t make any sense to him. “Why?” he said, when I explained to him that some kind of historically-rooted practice of music and worship seemed important. Because otherwise it’s no bigger than we are, I said. “Yes, but why is that important?” he insisted. Everything about his evangelical milieu that made me felt like an outsider was precisely what made it authentic, normative Christianity for him, and what my instincts were telling me to look for came across to my friend as no more than question begging from somebody who just didn’t want to deal with what Christianity actually is.

I should point out that there was an emphasis at both Overlake and at the INN on being nonsectarian. It became clear to me that “nonsectarian” usually manifested itself practically as a lowest common denominator form of worship, a reluctance to talk about theological detail (and yet a base assumption of some form of Reformed Christianity that was probably more anti-Catholic than anything), and occasionally, if pressed, some discussion of what each denomination got wrong from the “nonsectarian” viewpoint. In other words, it really took on its own forms, values, and dogma, becoming a “sect” or “denomination” in its own way. My friend’s responses in some of these conversations maybe make more sense from that perspective; the things I was concerned with were generally products of one “sect” or another (liturgical practice, musical traditions, historical expressions, etc.), and since really they were all more or less problematic, why not just flow with whatever cultural tide is coming in, particularly when it’s going to be a lot easier to reach people that way anyway?

Between the personal crisis that I was dealing with my freshman year (basically the culmination of much of what had been going on in my family since 1986/1987, brought to a head by the fact that we were now geographically separated) and my inability to find a church home under the circumstances that was anything like Northlake, my renewed sense of loss of place put me pretty much back where I had been throughout much of junior high and high school. Someone who self-identified as a Christian but who had no Christianity to identify with.

I must compress some events here, simply because there is about a 14 month period between major developments in which essentially nothing of any importance occurred. In the spring of 1995, I got a phone call from one Vernon Greenstreet, the organist and choir director at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. His usual tenor section leader had a conflict on Pentecost Sunday; might I be able to fill in at the rehearsal and the service for $40?

So, here was my first exposure to multiple ideas — one, that a church in the present day might actually have an “organist and choir director”. Two, that somebody might be paid for singing in church. Three, that there was such a thing called “Pentecost Sunday”. Four, that there might be a set of circumstances in which it would not only be appropriate for somebody like me to sing in church, but I’d even feel comfortable doing it. It was also my first time ever darkening the door of an Episcopal Church; I knew absolutely nothing about it, except that a Roman Catholic friend of mine in high school had once jokingly called it “Catholic Lite — all the salvation and none of the confession”, and I had no idea what to expect.

But the salient point for this young tenor finishing their freshman year of college was that somebody was offering me money to sing, the very first time anybody had ever done so. I said yes, of course, while indicating I would need a ride to rehearsal and to the service (St. Paul’s was too far away from campus to realistically walk). No problem, Vern said.

Sunday morning I was picked up by future Metropolitan Opera baritone Aaron St. Clair Nicholson, who was singing the solo for C. Alexander Peloquin’s “Psalm for Pentecost” (ah, whole tone scales…) (which was also my first, and by no means last, exposure to the repertoire published by GIA). The whole morning was a little surreal; St. Paul’s is (was? I haven’t been there in over 10 years) a big, beautiful, old-style brick church with thick carpet, high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, rood screen, stations of the cross, lady altar, chancel with choir stalls, and high altar. It represented a number of firsts for me; first time in a choir robe, first time processing, first time in a choir stall, and so on. The liturgy seemed reasonably similar to the Lutheran service at Northlake, so it was familiar in broad strokes, but the physical setting and the way it was celebrated suggested something with deeper roots. And by contrast to alt-pop songs being appropriated by a worship band, Peloquin seemed to at least strive for a certain standard of English language liturgical beauty.

But, fascinating as all that was, I was more interested in finding out if they could pay me to sing a bit more often. Well, no, not right now, Vern told me, but I’ll keep you on the list of alternates. (By the way, he said, I already paid my normal section leader for this month, so you’ll be getting a check from him. I did, in fact — and it bounced. Ah well.)

Skip ahead to summer 1996. The 1995-96 school year had gone by with a phone call or two from Vern, but we were never able to quite make all the connections work, and for a number of reasons that I’ll explain later, I found myself in Anchorage with my parents a full three weeks before the school year was over.

One day in July, an item in the Anchorage Daily News caught my eye, something about a controversial bishop whom I had never heard of before named John Shelby Spong doing a series of lectures in Anchorage on a book tour. I think I still have the clipping somewhere; humorously enough, on the other side is a story about a brand new invention that will change everything called a “cable modem”. If I can find it I’ll scan it and post it. Anyway, Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of the diocese of Newark, and all I knew of the Episcopal Church at that point was that one Pentecost service fourteen months previous, I knew nothing of the office of a bishop, I knew nothing of the details of what he preached, but reading the article I found out that there was somebody, a Christian leader, who took even less of the Bible literally than I did, and who said that in and of itself, that wasn’t a bad thing. I read Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism and Living In Sin?, and while I certainly didn’t buy everything he had to sell, I still found a fundamental point very important—that there could be differences of opinion on some things without it necessarily making somebody a non-Christian. At that point, anyway, that was a message I needed to hear. I went to his lectures while he was in town, and I got to chat with him a little bit. I found the lectures fascinating and him quite congenial; again, I didn’t believe everything he had to say, but it marked the first time I had ever heard somebody even try to put Scripture in context as a way of illuminating its meaning. Such things simply were not done in my experience up to that point.

When I returned to Bellingham that fall, I received a phone call from Vernon Greenstreet, who wanted to bring me in as the regular tenor section leader/soloist. St. Paul’s Episcopal Church thus became my de facto church home. I became friends with the associate organist, who had in a previous mode of existence — so to speak — been an Anglican monk, and expounded at great lengths about Anglican heritage and practice. I was painted a picture of a Christian heritage that kept its connection to history and Catholic identity while not requiring one to swallow the specificity of Roman Catholicism’s claims or to check one’s brain at the door. In this setting, I heard the words “Sacraments” and “Real Presence” and “Tradition” for the first time, as well as the notion that liturgy was an expression of belief, not an impediment to it — lex orandi, lex credendi, in other words. The real catechism, however, was from the chancel, where I quite literally had a front row seat for much of what appeared to give the liturgy and Sacraments depth, even in the context of watered-down Rite II. It’s amazing how much gravitas a rood screen, choir stalls, and pipe organ seem to provide. (Ah, but they stopped short of incense; the thurible was treated as an unwelcome relic of the past, to be brought out only at moments of absolute necessity and then to be employed with maximum economy and at least a week’s warning.) The whole picture seemed to bring alive, at least in some way, five hundred years’ worth of Christian history.

The priest, Fr. John Gibbs, came across as a kind, orthodox, welcoming man who wanted to cultivate where my interests seemed to lie, not chase me away because I didn’t think that it was necessary to believe in young earth creationism or think Bill Clinton was the antichrist. (I have since heard stories that lead me to believe that perhaps he was not as orthodox as he seemed; hard to say.) And, well, if Vern wasn’t exactly the high church true believer that my organist friend would have preferred, being there was a godsend in every respect (including being paid to be there, I must admit — making close to $400 for Holy Week, recompense that has yet to be matched in any other setting, was very much appreciated).

In any event, it was clear to me that God was there, and that that was where God wanted me at that point. When the words “Confirmation class” were uttered, I signed up (although for all practical purposes my organist friend was in charge of catechizing me, since the class was the same night as choir rehearsal). On 29 June 1997, at the age of 20, I was confirmed by Bp. Vincent Warner of the Diocese of Olympia, and got to sing L. J. White’s “A Prayer of Richard of Chichester” (the standard text of which, I am obliged to add, does not include the phrase “Day by day”, no matter what Stephen Schwartz wants to tell you) a duet with flute for the service. Alas, no family or friends came to my Confirmation; nobody who was around understood what was going on or what I was doing. My mother (who was in Alaska anyway) insisted that I had been raised as a fundamentalist Protestant; what did the seven sacraments or the three legged stool (for the uninformed — Scripture, Tradition, and Reason) have to do with Jesus? The girl I was with at the time identified as a pagan and wanted nothing to do with it. My INN friends most certainly didn’t get it (even though it was entirely consistent with everything I had been telling them for years). My organist friend had disappeared in the spring under what I will describe only as unpleasant circumstances, and I never saw him again.

One very interesting outcome of my taking the road to Canterbury that I didn’t even notice until much later was that it represented the first intermingling of my spiritual life with my professional aspirations. There would have been no place for the kind of singer I was in a setting like Overlake, but at St. Paul’s I started to think of myself as a “church musician”.

Naturally, as I settled in at St. Paul’s, other complex matters arose that made my post-confirmation time there necessarily short-lived.

More to come. Sorry about that.

Vom geschichtlichen Werden der Liturgie is a somewhat lesser-known work of Baumstark’s; it was published in 1923, a good eleven years before the publication of the lectures that would become the more famous Liturgie comparée (Comparative Liturgy). While the latter has been available in English translation since 1958, the former has only just been translated by Fritz West and published as On the Historical Development of the Liturgy.^[1] West, a liturgical scholar and UCC minister, has produced a very accessible and thoroughly annotated edition of the book, which hopefully will be thought-provoking and generative for a current crop of both liturgical historians and historians interested in liturgy.

A truly useful outcome of West’s translation would be a re-articulation of Baumstark’s framework in a way that takes into account modern historiographical approaches; as West notes in his introduction, Baumstark’s perspective is notably weighed down for today’s reader by a reliance on “Great Man”-style theoretical models. Even more problematic, however, is his post-World War I resentment-fueled German nationalism (Baumstark would become a Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s). This is most clearly evident in chapter 11, titled “Language and Nation,” in which he attempts to show the relationship between ethnic identity (the German word he uses is Blut; West translates it as “race”) and liturgical development. This section of the book is frankly uncomfortable to read, given Baumstark’s own historical context; consider passages such as this one:

The readings in the Roman Breviary from the First and Second Books of Maccabees make for a singular impression, with their responses containing prayers for times of war and expressing a soldier’s delight upon seeing sunlight reflecting off of golden shields. Had the German people not become the preeminent guarantor of the Roman liturgy’s preservation and dissemination, these readings would have been hard put to maintain their impressive position in the lectionary of the office. Now they stand there as a towering monolith, recalling the proud days of the Vikings and bearing public witness against all would confuse the virile spirit of the church with programs for world peace, born of a weak and weary spirit. Could a nation in fact collapse utterly when suffering the heaviest blow fate could mete out in a national war of desperation if — in that decisive hour of its history — that nation were able to experience firsthand the Breviary prayer for the month of October in a liturgical setting? […] Without exception it was emotional values that the German people contributed to their adopted Roman liturgy… the full actualization of the German national character in liturgy was fettered by the use of Latin, a foreign language… one can only imagine how the Roman liturgy would have developed on German soil had the dialect of the Saxon troubadours, who chanted Heliand, had the opportunity of becoming the language it used for worship.^[2]

Looked at another way, however, it is possible to see Baumstark’s project as tracing liturgical development in history as a way of constructing a Christian community that is truly universal, not just in geographic or national terms but in temporal terms — a way to establish a link to the Fathers, to putatively better times for German “Roman” Christianity in the person of Charlemagne (a figure constantly invoked by Baumstark), to Christ and the apostles themselves.

[The liturgical partcipant] participates in the deepest life of them all: the life of the millenniums. His individual prayer becomes for him an infinitesimally small ringlet in a virtually endless golden chain, stretching from the earthly days of the Son of Man, when Jesus wandered upon the shores of the blue Sea of Galilee, until that final day when he will await the return of the Son of Man in the glory of the Father.^[3]

Baumstark’s proposal is that the impact of historical factors — such as political developments, missionary activity, theological crises, and so on — on liturgical development leads to identifiable strata in the evidence, explicitly invoking geology as a comparable image (chapter 1). He begins tracing this impact through identifiable modalities in pre-Constantinian Christianity: differing liturgical practices in the private home and public gatherings (chapter 2), the Jewish synagogue (chapter 3), and the Hellenized world in Greece, Asia Minor, and beyond (chapter 4). This examination leads to the preliminary conclusion that the trajectory of liturgical development has been a fundamental diversity which are molded into increasing conformity (chapter 5).

Following that, Baumstark examines how the fundamental diversity manifests regionally, with major cities functioning as strong centers of influence on surrounding regions (chapter 6). These centers tend to influence each other, such as Jerusalem and Constantinople in the East and Rome and Gaul in the West (chapter 7). The top-down influence of political and ecclesiastical elites on liturgical development, with Baumstark’s prime example being Charlemagne’s project of simultaneously forging a German identity that is Roman and a “Roman” identity that is unmistakably German (chapter 8). Monastic and urban practices represent another axis that tends to more or less blend together (chapter 9).

Baumstark also argues that the impact of notable historical actors upon liturgical development is paradoxical but undeniable. The end result of the liturgy for the worshiper of any given period is necessarily impersonal, an object fundamentally rooted in communal experience, but looking backward, the hand of individuals must be acknowledged, be they hymnographers, ecclesiarchs, or putative “authors” of entire rites — but he is careful to point out that sometimes it is less significant that an individual actually had a particular liturgical impact than the community believes that person to be worth the attribution (chapter 10). Language and ethnic identity, as already discussed, are also important factors to be considered for Baumstark (chapter 11).

At some point, rites tend to coalesce into more-or-less final forms with their own immutable tendencies and characteristics that reflect the various factors that have led to this point (chapter 12). This seems to inevitably give rise to a situation where liturgical language is frozen independent of vernacular usage, leading to a pastoral problem that a given rite has to figure out how to solve without losing its fundamental character. Baumstark argues that the West solved this problem by emphasizing Latin as a unifying characteristic of the Roman liturgy; the East by assigning to the deacon a role that mediates the action at the altar to the congregation (chapter 13).

Rites may tend to let their characteristic tendencies completely overshadow their core liturgical function; here Baumstark specifically criticizes the East’s allowance of liturgical poetry to become a “thicket of rank growth, proliferating out of control (chapter 14).^[4] He also argues that the manifests in the East as a tendency towards overscripting the altar, turning the liturgy into a long exercise of personal devotion for the celebrant (chapter 15).

In the West, at least, the coalescence into a final form has led to formal, top-down mechanisms of reform and pruning, starting with the Council of Trent. These mechanisms, according to Baumstark, generally work as intended in the West, although in the East similar attempts appear to have messier results, such as the Old Believer schism in Russia (chapter 16).

Finally, Baumstark cautions, the scholar and worshiper must be careful with what they do with this kind of information, because of the clear limits of what we can conclude from our data. Of course, the methodology modeled by Baumstark is useless for predicting future changes, but epistemological boundaries exist looking backward as well. A historical understanding of the liturgy can enrich a present-day encounter, but without the context of direct experience, we can never completely ascertain the liturgical practices of a given time and place in their fulness (chapter 17).

It seems to me that it would be useful to reconsider many elements of Baumstark’s perspective anew. Off the top of my head, some possibilities of what could be done seem to be — how does a periodization model that includes late antiquity impact how these arguments are articulated?^[5] How does a model of center and periphery clarify the relationships of geography and liturgy?^[6] How could recent explorations of sensory experience in liturgy allow us to rethink the text-heavy emphasis?^[7] How do frameworks such as Benedict Anderson’s imagined community illuminate the various social dimensions of the liturgy?^[8] How does Paul Connerton’s work on inscribed vs. Incorporated memory suggest further pathways to better understanding Baumstark’s argument that the liturgy functions “trans-historically”?^[9] How does the identification of orientalism as a problematic meta-narrative help us to tease apart Baumstark’s tendency to view development in the East as self-indulgent overgrowth, while the character of Roman liturgy is the standard to which everything else adheres or from which everything else falls away?^[10] How might the methodology of ethnomusicology help us to better understand the ways in which the liturgy expresses characteristics and tendencies of the worshipping community?^[11] If the liturgy is itself an object that belongs to the community, can we push that further and try to talk about a given rite, or a given section of a rite, as a “thing”?^[12] Those are all very theory-heavy ideas from somebody who generally only half-jokingly introduces himself as a “paleostructuralist”, but they strike me as having the potential to be genuinely illuminating and generative of further discussion. They also have the extra advantage of being the kinds of approaches that would make liturgical matters relevant to historians who are not liturgical specialists.

West’s translation is quite lucid and readable; the annotations are generally very useful, if verging on repetitive at times. He also includes a collection of short biographies of all historical figures mentioned, which in and of itself is an invaluable reference. There are minor errors, such as the claim that the Syriac language is named for historic Syria^[13] (it appears to have nothing to do with the historic region, with its origins as a distinct literary language apparently being in Mesopotamia)^[14]. There also seems to be some fuzziness on the specifics of Eastern liturgical forms; Baumstark refers to the Latin Stabat mater text as “a Western counterpart to the ancient Syrian-Greek lament heard from Mary at the cross,”^[15] most likely a reference to the genre of Eastern hymn known as the stavrotheotokion, but West’s note relates it to the ninth ode of the canon for Holy Saturday (“Do not lament me, O Mother…”), which seems to me improbable. Nonetheless, West has made a most valuable contribution by making this book accessible to English audiences.

I can’t help but wonder what Baumstark would have thought about the developments in the Roman liturgy post-Vatican II; would his framework have allowed him to understand the changes in terms of continuity? I expect not, but that may be something for others to argue about.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. 2 ed. New York: Verso, 2006.

Baumstark, Anton. On the Historical Development of the Liturgy. Translated by Fritz West. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2011.

Boulay, Juliet du. Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village. Edited by Denise Harvey, The Romiosyni Series. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2009.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1-22.

Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity: Ad 150-750. Edited by Geoffrey Barraclough, Library of World Civilization. London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1989.

Coakley, J. F. Robinson’s Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar. 5 ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Galtung, Johan. “A Structural Theory of Imperialism.” Journal of Peace Research 8, no. 2 (1971): 81-117.

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Edited by Peter Brown, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Jeffery, Peter. Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant. Edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Bruno Nettle, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Reprint, 2003.

Bloomington, Indiana – The Saint John of Damascus Society, founded in 2011, is a new sacred arts organization that seeks to promote excellence in the liturgical music of the Orthodox Christian Church, regardless of ethnic/national heritage of style, as well as support related outreach, educational, and academic efforts. We are pleased to announce our new publication, Paraklitiki: The Journal of the Saint John of Damascus Society. Publication in both print and electronic form will be twice-yearly, and the first issue will appear in January 2013. The language of the journal will be English.

Paraklitiki welcomes quality essays and articles dealing with any aspect of Orthodox liturgical music, monophonic and polyphonic, including history, theory, pedagogical matters and performance practice, theological issues, language, music as outreach, source studies, cultural aspects, and interplay with vernacular music. New compositions are also welcome, regardless of style, heritage, or type of notation.

Submissions should adhere to the following guidelines:

• Submissions are accepted on an ongoing basis.
• Conformity to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16^th Edition, as appropriate to the piece.
• Length may vary depend on topic and treatment; in general, submissions longer than 5,000 words may either be edited or split across issues.
• Previously published material will not be accepted. Pieces that have been previously disseminated electronically (e.g., as a blog post or in a message forum) will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Please inquire via e-mail in this case.
• Applicant’s name and contact information should appear only on a cover page.
• Articles, essays, and reviews should be submitted in MS Word format.
• Scores should be digitally typeset and submitted in PDF format.

Books and recordings will also be reviewed; review copies should be sent to The Saint John of Damascus Society, 2609 Spicewood Lane, Bloomington, IN 47401 ATTN: Paraklitiki.

Please send all manuscripts, as well as any queries concerning possible submissions, to submissions@johnofdamascus.org, (alternate: st.johnofdamascussociety@gmail.com) and please ensure that the subject line of the e-mail begins with the word “SUBMISSION” in all-caps.

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So, for a number of reasons, I thought it would be cool to get a particular model Russell Hobbs teakettle.

You will perhaps notice already what my issue is.

Yep, it’s a UK plug. Now, this was hardly an “Aha! Fooled you!” moment; I knew it had a UK plug when I bought it, and I ordered it off of Amazon UK. I knew exactly what I was ordering when I ordered it. I just figured, “Hey, there’s gotta be a workaround.” It seemed worth it; I was told that UK kettles are nice because they heat up near-instantly, and they’re great if you can get them working. There seemed to be some folks online who had done it, so there seemed to be precedent for my impracticality.

(And, I’ll be honest, there was a geeky impulse behind the purchase as well. Judge me if you must. I already said this wasn’t the most practical thing I’ve ever done.)

So, I took the element to a local electrics shop.

“What do I need to make this run?” I asked.

The guy looked at me like I was perhaps on the simple side. (And yes, perhaps I am.) “UK plug adapter and a step-up transformer for 220-240v, rated for 3 kilowatts,” he said. “Good luck.”

So, fine. I got exactly that.

Here’s what happens when I try to use the kettle:

(Forgive the Darth Vader breathing; I’ve been sick for the last two weeks.) As you can see, it works for a bit (aren’t the shiny blue lights awesome!), then the transformer’s circuit breaker trips. After a few seconds, I can reset the circuit breaker, the kettle goes again, the breaker trips, reset, kettle goes again, breaker trip, reset, kettle finishes boiling and shuts itself off. It still all happens in less time than it would take to boil the water on the stove, but I can’t really say that it’s exactly what I had in mind.

So, short of moving to the UK, what can I do to get this to work?