We don’t actually “host emergence.” We host interactions and work with constraints that change what is possible. In human systems, interpretation matters too: how people, including facilitators, make sense of what is happening changes what happens next.
Some good recent reads which didn’t make it into full blog posts:
Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry’s poem, September 2: “If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.”
A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: “So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”.”
“We are fixing up the record” says Jungurrayi Simms Otto in this short and beautiful documentary. He is summarizes the work of a collaboration between the English artist Patrick Waterhouse and a slew of Warlpiri artists as they revise historical records of the British colonial occupation of the Warlpiri homelands .
Who doesn’t like some deeply evidence based takedowns of terrible research or policy? Here’s a couple from Dougald Lamont. One on a “racist and sexist” report from the MacDonald-Laurier Institute on the productivity cost of DEI policies in Canadian universities and another that dismantles the case for Alberta separatism because, well, its based on fever dreams. That one got a follow up.
Issues of Aboriginal rights and title are important in British Columbia, and actually have been since 1851. Political mischief has turned these issues of fundamental justice and law into a political football. As Canadian citizens we have to understand the LAW of the situation not just the politics. Aaron Pete, another voice I dont always agree with, has a good piece on this today.
Through my library I subscribe to The Paris Review, one of the world’s premier literary magazines. The first story in this issue is called Bubble by Angie Sijun Lou and I highly recommend it. A story of a Spokane high school student who is sent to her father’s home village to China. A beautifully crafter coming of age story for introverts. Lots of her writing is also available on her website.
Pointing you to a recent podcast from The Hub, my favourite source of conservative policy opinion, on the role of private capital in public infrastructure.
A group’s capability is related to its internal differences. Work with those and all kinds of capabilities can be revealed.
One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O Magnum Mysterium.
Last season we added an Irish pub night on St. Patricks Day which will will repeat again this season and our vocal adventure will extend to include a whole show devoted to Broadway, on November 23. Our season will wrap up on June 26 with an electic performance of songs from this whole range of music making.
Monday night was our first rehearsal of the season and we worked on some of the sacred music pieces which we will perform at a contemplative experience on January 30. Specifically we looked at Voctoria’s O magnum mysterium, Robert Parson’s Ave Maria and a Kyrie from Palestrina.
These pieces are interesting to compare side by side. Palestrina’s smooth voice leading almost defines the very genre of Renaissance liturgical music. His harmonies are tight, and mostly consonant, while Victoria, writing in Spain, offers more “crunch” as we say in his work. The opening of the Kyrie is pure imitative polyphony. Altos, then Basses, Sopranos and then Tenors. We just worked the first few bars of this, and danced together with the entrances and lines moving against each other.
In contrast, looking at Victoria’s piece, we focused only on the final few bars, the Alleluia. The piece is very modal and slow but the final section has a jaunty little 3/4 section that returns to the original slow 4/4 time of the rest of the piece. It’s tricky, but shows up some of his more interesting compositional decisions.
Parson’s Ave Maria Parsons’s Ave Maria was chosen partly because of its extraordinary soprano line. Beneath it, four voices weave and braid their lines together; the soprano enters above them in long notes, each successive entrance beginning a step higher than the one before. The bass anchors the other extreme of the texture, and as we sing it I have the sensation of the whole piece opening up between those high and low registers. To me it is evocative of Mary receiving the message of the angel: thoughts moving and rising through her mind while something deeper and steadier holds the whole experience.
After working through short sections of these pieces, we flew into a short survey of Broadway tunes, which most everyone could sight read, so familiar are they. You’ll Never Walk Alone, Welcome to the Rock, I Dreamed a Dream, Edelweiss, and others. We’ve never done show tunes before but I think this show will be a treat. It’s not music I have sung a lot (other than at football matches) but some of it is certainly in the repertoire of the jazz standards I play with my friend Alex Fox.
So another season of music begins. I thought I’d chart this one here a bit this year.