Monica

1. What prompted you to seek out a new religion? I suspect you have already written on this so a pointer to what you have written before would be fine. ( Read more... )

2. I liked the time machine question Liam asked so, with no chance of death or injury what five events/people/things in history would you go back to witness? ( Read more... )

3. What music projects do you have going on this coming year? ( Read more... )

4. If you could have your Pennsic house made all over again, what changes would you make to it (or have Johan make to it)? ( Read more... )

5. You have just witnessed the murder of a loved one. You are safe and there is no danger to your life. You have the power to immediately kill the murderer or let them get away and potentially never be caught. What do you do? ( Read more... )

I think I've now gotten questions to everyone who's asked for some so far. Please let me know if I'm wrong about that.

( death, Catholicism, SCA, meeting people, job )

Here's how it works:

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

Hey look -- the interview meme is back. :-)

( life update, On the Mark, SCA topics )

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

My synagogue has each grade-school class run one service a year. This has been frustrating for me for a variety of reasons, but this year they made a change. Fourth and fifth grades are now having their services at the monthly "family" Shabbat service, rather than the primary congregational service, and all classes are being split into two services. (Some classes have 50+ kids, and that was just too crazy.)

Last night was the first of these modified services, and it went very well. It was much less chaotic, the kids got to do more, and it was more of a service than a pageant for the parents. And the younger grades, which are more problematic, are doing their services in a more supportive (for them) and less annoying (for the rest of us) environment. It's a win all around, I think.

When there's a bar or bat mitzvah (which is almost every week), that person participates a bit in the Friday service (kiddush and v'shamru). The girl who was bat mitzvah this Shabbat is really good -- good Hebrew pronunciation, good singing voice, and, most importantly, good kavanah. She seemed to really connect with the words she was saying; she was leading, not just performing. At the oneg I told her how impressed I am and that I hope she'll continue to be involved -- confirmation, youth group, etc.

This morning's service went well. For the second week in a row I successfully wound the torah scroll to the right point before the service; I'll learn my way around yet. :-) (Usually the rabbi does it, but both times I was there first and I guess I'm sort of the quasi-gabbai or something now, so I took a crack at it.)

Three of our upcoming Torah readers specifically signed up for their own bar/bat-mitzvah portions. Two are students (so this was fairly recent). None of them have committed to doing more than the one portion, but I hope at least some of them decide to stick with it. Right now I've got five people (including myself) who are "regulars", and several people who are doing it once and then will decide. (I'm not counting the rabbi, who reads in weeks without b'nei mitzvah. I think there are four of those in the next six months.) I'd like to have about eight regulars.

On my way to services Friday I ran into someone on the street who said "hey, aren't you a cantor at [congregation]?" I said I had led services there occasionally but now they've hired a professional (who, I said, is good), and he said flattering things about my work. That was pleasant. (He doesn't belong there either and goes only occasionally, but seems to have hit several of my services purely by accident.)

I've been reading a book called The Kiruv Files, about Jewish outreach. More about that later, but one observation now: one of us, either I or the Orthodox rabbis who wrote it, has a fundamental misunderstanding of Reform Judaism. The book takes a few swipes at Reform, predicated on the assumption that "all halacha is optional for you guys" (so therefore you can change the rules to suit your whims). Um, no. That Reform does not accept the system of halacha handed down to us, wholesale, and that Reform insists on personal autonomy, does not mean that we get to ignore it all. Many Jews do, of course (and not all of them call themselves Reform), but serious Reform Jews can and do accept some halachot as binding -- just as binding as traditional Jews do. This is why I do not work on Shabbat, why I keep kosher, why I pray in certain ways, and why I do or don't do bunches of other stuff. The problem, to the outsider, is that a different Reform Jew will have a different set of binding halachot.

Thursday night's board meeting included the quarterly financial review (budget vs actuals). The reports are getting clearer, in part due to requests from me. :-) And I see that a couple of our newer board members are very concientious (and nit-picky) in reviewing these things, which makes me happy. I'm in my last year; someone else has to be as anal-retentive for me, for continuity. :-) (I'm also on the nominating committee for the next round of board members, which should be interesting. That was announced Thursday.)

Tuesday lyev and I had a small dance workshop (no one else could make it) in which we reconstructed Belfiore (15th-century Italian) from first principles. It turns out that there is one ambiguity that I hadn't remembered from the last time I looked at this (with Rosina): do the three dancers start side-by-side, like in Petit Vriens, or in a single-file line? We had assumed the former, but one of the figures is difficult that way and there are references in the text to dancers "above" and "below" others (where we are not talking about vertical displacement with respect to the floor). We only had two dancers so couldn't try a complete implementation, but I can see the single-file line working. Eventually we'll be able to give it a shot, or lyev will get the Thursday dancers to try it. And I should check our notes from Joy and Jealousy now; I didn't want to do that before because it's actually been long enough that I've forgotten and this way I could come to it without (obvious) preconceptions.

Tonight we went to a restaurant that was so dimly lit that I actually had to take the menu to the front (lobby) area so I could read it. Argh! I'm not surprised by dim light from fancy and/or pretentious restaurants, where I guess the assumption is that you don't need to see your food and candles are romantic, but -- Outback? C'mon! I guess I should be on the lookout for a flashlight small enough to carry in a pocket; I think they make such things targetted for shining a light on your door locks at night; I would imagine that's designed to be fairly small.

Tonight's dance workshop was on 15th-century-Italian steps. We didn't do any dances; we spent the evening on styling, fitting steps properly to the music, discussing ornamentation, and so on. I really enjoyed it.

Lessons learned: (1) I still don't have a good handle on the rise/fall pattern (we have an idea that might not be right but feels natural); (2) shoulder-shading is finally starting to make sense to me in slower tempi; and (3) my left knee still doesn't want me to do saltarelli (hopping steps). Fortunately, I can fake a hop, and especially when dancing in garb (floor-length dresses for women), no one will know. (The knee problem is the result of an auto accident 9 years ago. I guess at this point it's not going to get better.)

I think one of the other folks who was there gives me too much credit for knowledge of 15th-century dance because of Joy and Jealousy. I was the music geek and general editor on that project; Rosina is the dance expert. Of course we bounced stuff off of each other, but she did the real dance research. My role was to ask annoying questions and challenge her statements. :-) (And, sometimes, to say "sorry, the music can't support that interpretation".)

J&J was a fun project (with occasional moments of "what were we thinking?" during the final stages). Being a publisher was a pain, though, and after two printings I lost heart. I wish the person who had planned to take over publication and keep it in print had done so. Someone else has put much of it on the web, for which I am grateful; we need to finish that at some point. (Scanning the music doesn't work very well. My software doesn't write useful file formats. I need to try to hook up with Acrobat Distiller, which I have at work but not at home.)

Ironically, tonight on the way out from work two of my coworkers were talking about books. One wants to write a book someday; the other was emphatically not interested in doing such a thing. They asked me and I said that really, I'd like to have written a book (in my professional field, I meant). :-) But that technically I suppose I already had written a book, except that vanity press doesn't count. They asserted that it does, though when I told them the subject I think they glazed over a bit.

At the next workshop we're returning to 16th-century Italian, a type of dance that I know very little about. So I will enjoy working on that.

Our local SCA group has traditionally hosted an event dedicated to music and dance every couple of years, give or take. The day consists of several tracks of classes and, generally, two balls. (The first is modelled on what we know of real balls in the 16th century, which are more performance than social dancing. The second is the typical SCA social dance. Both are lots of fun; they are very different.)

It's been more than two years since we did the last one of these, so people are starting to drop not-so-subtle hints, like walking up to the usual suspects and asking what the date of the next one is. So Ts'vee'a is in the process of organizing something, and she hit me up to help organize the classes. This makes sense; I do have a laurel (the SCA's highest arts award) for music, after all. :-)

This got me thinking about a class I tried to teach a few years ago, at Pennsic, that I think was a failure. Pennsic is a multi-day event, so it's the perfect place to schedule something that's going to take 4 or 5 hours. (In a one-day event, you won't get takers.) I did a composition workshop, modelled on writers' workshops: you send in your piece in advance, along with whatever notes you have about the style you were trying to do and stuff like that, and everyone gets everyone else's submissions and we all get together to discuss. Sounds fun, but I only got two takers and they weren't very talkative. It turned into individual tutoring, sort of. I felt pretty unhappy about it. It takes me a while to psych myself up to do any sort of presentation (other than music performance) in front of groups of people who aren't already close friends, and when something like that happens I can just feel my self-esteem getting crushed that much more.

The topic came up last night, and someone suggested an alternative approach: do a shorter class (an hour?), bring a piece (or part of a piece) to arrange, and, as a group, develop it. e.g.: What shape of bass line does this melody imply? Now what would you do with the inner parts? Ok, that's a functional alto line, but what would you do to make it more interesting to sing? And so on.

I wonder how well this would work. I wonder if I can be clever enough to choose (or create) a piece, or snippet of a piece, that will trigger the most common problems in composition/arrangement.

Fortunately, I've got a while to figure out if I can do this; the event hasn't even been approved yet, and we're currently shooting for late April.