I've been framed! Adventures in carillon-engineering land

When I went to Luc this morning, he asked if I had any detailed designs for the frame of my instrument (meaning every part of the system that isn't copied over 49 times, ie excluding keys, springs, tonebars, etc). I wasn't planning to design that until I understood what I wanted the repeated systems to look like and how they would fit into the frame. But Luc suggested the other approach, build a frame and then use it to speed up the other experimentation. He also suggested outsourcing it to his frame-builder guy. He added that he was going to visit the frame-builder-guy that afternoon.
So my brief meeting with Luc turned into a quick turnaround assignment: make a bunch of decisions upfront and then design a frame that would still be relatively adaptable to the designs that I'm considering, so that it can be used to test all of them, and so that once I do make my decisions there's a chance I can use it in the final product. Since its almost March, I welcomed the time pressure and spent a while in the carillon museum, measuring the various practice instruments from throughout the ages, toying with design ideas, and specifying through text and drawing, down to the millimeter in some cases, what I wanted in a frame.

Here are drawings of a couple of the more innocuous parts (since I don't want to reveal all my secrets to the web). Not bad for someone who thinks he can't draw, eh? Now don't go stealing my vague ideas and marketing them around the highly lucrative practice carillon industry. Copyright: me.


I delivered the specifications to Luc, 6 hours after our initial meeting, with the instructions to go ahead with it if the guy quotes below my threshold price and to call me for any prices higher. I haven't heard from him yet so I'm hoping it'll be a cheap job.




In other engineering related news, the clapper on the lowest A-bell of the carillon of St. Rombouts snapped mid-strike, hurling its 100-some pound clapper ball across the bell-chamber and marking the temporary uselessness of that bell with a resounding clang and thud. I had the honor of having given the clapper its final strike, though the bell had been acting strangely for the past week or so, and I don't think I can claim the kind of muscle it takes to snap a healthy iron rod in half.

A year ago at the International Carillon Festival in Bok Tower Gardens, I wished Boudewijn Zwart good luck on his recital by telling him to break a pedal. After delivering the final concert of the festival, he returned to the ground to show me a splintered fragment of a pedal in hand -- apparently these wear-and-tear events happen. Unfortunately clappers need to be cast in a foundry, making it unlikely that the rather important A-pedal will be in use any time in the next week. Hopefully I'll still find a way to keep the practice up.

Back Across the Pond

I spent the last 2.5 weeks in the US, and am happy to report that I have nothing to report, other than that it was really great to be back and see you all.
And in spite of all my moaning about being all alone in Belgium, its actually been great to be back. Besides being fun, going home for a few weeks has been helpful for getting some perspective on my time here. All of a sudden the sounds and sights of Belgium are special again -- my apartment is amazing again, the opportunity to practice carillon and lead a leisurely life (presuming I can keep my busy side in check) is once again a privilege.

Two nights ago I went to visit Beth Hillel in Brussels for Friday night service - a congregation that's reformish enough to put a large portion of their services in the lingua franca, and Brusselsish enough for that lingua to be French.
Its still the standard liturgy that I'm used to hearing in the hebrew and following half in the hebrew, half in the Enlgish. Only now they're speaking the same words in a totally different language, one that I'm not used to encountering in the Jewish context, one that really only seems fit for catholicism or existentialism. You hear French phrases, translate them in your head, say, hmm, that idea sounds vaguely familiar, oh its Psalm 96. Trippy. Maybe I can find one in Dutch before I leave?


A sample day (biased sample selection):
Having staying up 'till 5am with e-mail and IM and whatnot, I wake up around 10 and head to handbells class. Afterwards, I meet Cyril and Chelsea, friends from Bxls, take them up the tower, and hang out and play (well) for an hour or so. Then beer and lunch with them on the terrace of a cafe in the Grote Markt / Grand Place, outdoors in the sun (still with warm sweater, but nonetheless). Class at 3:30 in which Koen explains ancient and medieval systems of timekeeping and conceptions of time, the mechanics of tower clockworks, and the art of programming music into 17th century automatic-play mechanisms. He gives me a 5 pound tome on the Art of the Carillon in the Low Countries to start reading through, something that actually strikes me as exciting (its got good pictures, which helps).
Ren comes upstairs to do laundry and we end up lying on the floor in my apartment listening to Idan Raichel. Turns out we're both underslept. Then, on my way to bed I accidentally get drawn in to the conclusion of the novel I was reading and lie in the hammock in my living room for a couple hours seeing how it ends. 1am and I head to bed, sleeping up for my early morning meeting with Luc Michiels to pick up again on the engineering stuff.


The sun sets after 6pm. I have over 3 extra hours of daylight. Its been warm enough to have throngs of people sitting outdoors at the cafes. There was a carnivale parade in Mechelen on Sunday. I've been to Brussels twice already in the week since I've returned. I learned a new piece in about 4 days. I'm reading an interesting book. It even seems like I'm more able to find people around when I want them. I been in the tower twice and am very happy with my playing. I've caught myself trying to do too much twice already, but the rest of the time I seem to be doing well. And without 7 extra hours of night-classes in Dutch, I think things feel a bit roomier time-wise.

As for now, I sign off from perhaps the shortest and easiest post-trip blog entry I've ever written.

Israel

It happened around mid-November. I wasn't feeling ready to go back to the US as planned, during winter break. I wanted generally to tour Europe but was in a bit of a rut and didn't have the ideas or energy to put something together for December. And I got a call from my friend Sarah Beller: "I'm going to Israel. Wanna come?"
We talked it over and eventually I got on board.


The trip had 3 components.
1) Arrival, shabbat, and general hanging out with friends who were in Jerusalem for the year;
2) Visits to Palestine / the West Bank;
3) a visit to an enviro-kibbutz in the south.

I added on some scuba diving for myself during the last part of the trip, and on December 28th Sarah and I met in the Tel Aviv airport and made our way via sherut (shared taxi) to J'lem.
In the sherut we met someone who knew a friend of ours and had been involved in our e-mail conversation about travelling to the West Bank. It was going to be the first of one of many random "small world" run ins that happened, more or less on a daily basis, in the small world that is anglo-Jerusalem.



Stage 1: Jerusalem.
Mood: Joyful and Festive.
Rating: Awesome.


Looking back on the trip, I think one of the really amazing parts was getting to reconnect with friends and friendships in various degrees of development, ranging from people who I already had a strong relationship with, to people that I had shared community with but hadn't really gotten to really spend time one-on-one with, to friends-of-friends that I hadn't yet met, and all the stages in-between. This Jewish, justicey, post-denominational post-geographical overly-educated add-your-own-adjective seemingly-ever-outward-stretching community that I have found myself a part of over the last few years seems to consistently succeed in popping out great new people. Outside of it I find it rare to quickly connect to people -- inside, it seems to happen all the time. It felt great to be surrounded by people at once interested in making the world a better place, and also in living spiritually and emotionally rich lives enjoying what good the world and its inhabitants have to offer. It became evident to me that as much as I needed to cocoon for a bit in Belgium, having this community and these people in my life is important to me.
So, there was the usual bounty of Shabbes meals and walks, great food and song, and generally doing J'lem from the living room, ordinary street, and park perspective, rather than the tourist track.

Post-shabbes I hit the tourist track and took a walk to the old city. I visited "the wall", meaning the western wall, the holiest site for Jews, and found it to be disturbingly a) touristy, b) dominated by one particular and self-proclaimed-authentic form of Judaism, c) why are we holding a site or a physical object as holy? Isn't that a little bit against the whole Judeo-radical-monotheism revolution? d) meaningful in spite of, or perhaps because of all these conflicting issues condensed into a single physical experience of who-I-am / what-I-am-a-part-of. Its strange, but encountering that sort of fragmentation and conflict within something that is supposedly me, my culture, my people, in my name, etc. can be just as powerful an experience as encountering abundant perfection in the same realm; just to encounter that realm of selfness-in-world in any state is a step towards the more intense, especially when I'm so used to playing the stranger-in-a-strange-land.
There was a lot of tension between what the site suggested my identity to be and who I felt like; what this site suggested the world should be like and how I felt it should be. A custodial worker passed before me sweeping notes, people's handwritten prayers for their deepest hopes, into his waste-bin en masse to be incinerated or dropped in a landfill somewhere far away. The holy collides with the mundane and the profane. In Israel there's not enough space to keep them separate anymore.

Afterwards I met a Berkeley grad who was working consulting in Bahrain and we took a walk together through the shuk in the Muslim quarter that eventually placed us on a walk atop the wall that surrounded the old city, overlooking the beauty and chaos below. Once atop the wall I admitted that I had been a bit nervous walking around below, and he admitted that he felt the same -- he could just see the headlines: "American tourists shot by Israeli soldiers". I found this enlightening -- we were of two minds here. Of course it makes sense to be afraid of the 18 year olds with the machine guns. But to me, they weren't personally threatening. Aesthetically unpleasing, even politically problematic, but certainly not threatening. Heck, sometimes when I felt like I might be wandering into the wrong part of town, seeing the IDF uniform was a relief. They probably went to school with one of my friends' cousins. I could speak Hebrew with them. I could use the right code words. I could pass for "one-of-us" in their eyes. There's safety in that identity. But that same identity that made me feel relatively ok with the soldiers while my companion felt threatened, created the opposite effect for both of us on the streets of the Muslim shuk. I didn't know the callsigns there, and though my identity wasn't visually apparent, if revealed it might cast me in a poor light, regardless of my own personal political views. He was a Christian tourist -- relatively innocuous in that setting.
Israel is a place where identity and all of the hooplah surrounding it suddenly take on a whole new importance. Your religion, your nationality, your culture, and your politics all have big impacts on who you can relate to, where you can go, what you can do, how safe you feel, how people treat you, etc. And the degree to which you can pass or present ambiguously very much affect your experience in day to day life. I felt that over the course of the trip, whether for safety's sake or just for comfort / pleasantness' sake, I had to stay very mindful of how I presented and what I revealed about myself. The times when I could pass for having a good / acceptable identity, my privilege became very present and real for me. The times when I couldn't were hard, frustrating, and sometimes even frightening. More on this in stage 2.




One highlight of the Jerusalem component of the trip was playing carillon at the YMCA building right outside the old city. I took two cohorts of about 5-6 friends up, one on Monday, one on Tuesday. We did about half an hour of playing on the small and somewhat dilapidated, but still pretty-sounding instrument there, then a climb up to the top of the tower to catch the end of the sunset and sing some nigunnim to the old city.
Others highlights: Ringing in the secular new year a la renewal Judaism, seeing cats walking the streets, being surrounded by Jerusalem stone and plants living and growing all around, clear sunny skies, temperate weather conditions, taking in the sights of the various shuks (marketplaces), and of course, eating real falafel and hommous.
Most small-world experience: Besides the daily run-ins on the street, there was one contra dance where my friend Ilana showed up by surprise, and then one of my dance partners ended up also being the host of a New Year's party that I later attended.


Stage 2: Palestine.
Mood: Sometimes heavy, sometimes joyful, always stretching and growing.
Rating: Awesome.


I am standing out on a dark and empty street. The air is filled with the sound of the adhan, the day's final call prayer. It pours forth loudly, overwhelmingly from each and every tower of the many surrounding mosques, each at a different tempo and pitch, overlapping, mingling and clashing like turbulent waves from adjoining seas. It is my first time ever hearing this sound in person. I find it simultaneously alien, terrifying, and beautiful. And, to my amusement, familiar in the most surprising of ways. Every day I listen to the bells of Mechelen compete with each other and fill the soundscape in this very same fashion. I breathe in this sound and take pride in my achievement of coming out here, of braving the unknown, while at the same time making sure I stay within a 5-second dash to the protective front door of my host's house.
OK. I admit it. I was nervous. Who wouldn't be? I knew so little of what I might find on the other side of "the wall" (now meaning the "security barrier" that Israel has erected between itself and the Palestinian population, both groups loosely defined), and the little I did know suggested grave danger. My only clue that this impression might be incorrect was that many of my friends regularly went across. A couple even ran an organization called Encounter Tours that took Jews with no experience in the area into the West Bank.
The plan was to go over with Encounter Tours for the day -- then Sarah and I would stayed the night with a local host, Abed (a colleague of Sarah's boyfriend who runs an arts program in the Aida refugee camp) while the rest of our group headed back to Israel proper.

Some words about safety, so that I can leave it behind. My friends made sure I was well-informed and well-prepared. I never had to be away from a professional or local who had taken on the obligation to keep me safe. I had a lot of input from people living in Israel. I had cash and emergency phone numbers under the insole of my shoe, a practice donated from a friend and one I intend to keep. What's safety in these situations? 20,000 Christian tourists pass right through Bethlehem without a hitch.

Our group of 9 set off early from Jerusalem. We took cabs to the checkpoint. Our driver asked us to have our money ready so he could drive off as quickly as possible and not risk having his car stoned. I'm pretty sure nobody throws stones right outside the checkpoint, but we found this to be telling about the attitudes on the ground. We crossed the checkpoint by foot and got into our tour van on the other side, and our day began.

We met with the deputy mayor of Bethlehem and principal of a Christian-Palestinian school. We saw the landscape, the various segments of the wall, the Jewish settlements atop the hills, and the protected roads and tunnels that cut across the countryside to connect them to Jerusalem. We saw the countryside too, full of beautiful terraced hills and olive trees. We met with the director of a non-violent resistance program over a lunch of delicious Palestinian foods, most of which we had encountered as delicious Israeli foods earlier in the week. We saw the churches and all the important sites of Christianity. We visited the Aida refugee camp and met with Abed.

And then Sarah and I waved goodbye to our the rest of the Encounter tour, goodbye to the sense of security that came with having an experienced friend in charge, goodbye to the safe and easy way to a bed in the midst of Jerusalem. We took a brief walking tour of the camp with Abed. We met a lot of children along the way, and got to see the general layout. As night fell, we hopped into his car and drove to his house in Beit-Sahour, about 10 minutes away.

Sarah took a nap before dinner and I managed to convince Abed to let me help with the cooking. The dinner was delicious. Abed had worked as a chef in Paris while he was getting his degree over there.
We talked a lot over the cooking, and afterwards too, over the dinner. And even after dinner, we lingered at the table for a while, listening to Abed and drinking sage tea made with sage from his former village in Israel; and eating Belgian chocolates that I had brought over as an attempt to somehow thank him for the kindness and hospitality he'd shown us.
The next day we toured the refugee camp again, toured the facilities of Al-Rowad, the arts camp, and had a good long talk with Husam Jubran, who had started the non-violent activism program that we encountered the day before. We looked, talked, and explored, then left in the early afternoon so that we could make it to the checkpoint before sundown, and make it through before the evening rush. The plan had been to have Abed put us in a taxi, but by this point Sarah and I both decided that we wanted to make our way to the checkpoint by foot. This was probably the scariest part of the whole experience. It was our first time being alone, without a guide, without a local host who was a respected member of the community to protect us. I was walking with two dual and very different impressions in my mind -- mindful both of my recent experiences of hospitality and kindness, and also the sorts of dangers that I'd been taught to expect over there. I clung to 'Marhaba', the basic arabic greeting. Its funny how the little things make all the difference, but the fact that its normal to greet strangers on the street in Palestine made things feel so much safer. It let me set a friendly tone with every passerby -- it let me hear their voice and see their eyes, and in some sense, know who I was dealing with. We did the 10-15 minute walk to the checkpoint together. We walked along the wall, the security barrier and studied the impressive array of art and graffiti that covered its surface. I don't know how much of it is locally done -- I understand that a lot of international artists have used the wall to provide visual statements of solidarity. Very little of it was violent, but a lot spoke of pain and outrage, and also faith that better days were to come. Most of it was very beautiful. We arrived at the checkpoint, made our way through the various tunnels and fences, barriers, gates, and metal detectors, and emerged into Israel proper.
Since the exit is also the entrance, the final act of our crossing was to make our way through a thick and long line of Palestinian workers waiting to get through and go back home. They squeezed against the fences on either side of the path to make a narrow corridor for us. It felt pretty horrible, getting waved through as soon as the blue of our passports showed, walking through as casual tourists while these people waited and waited, having what should be a 15 minute commute transformed into a long daily ordeal. I felt so unjustly privileged , so apologetic, but what do you do, what do you say? We walked through in silence.

This story has been a hollow shell consisting of only the most basic chronology. I've said nothing about the content of my conversations; the sights, the moods, the feel of life on the other side; my impressions; my reflections; my conclusions, if any. And I've needed to avoid all of that to keep myself out of the mire of personal political content that I'm still working on putting into words. Hopefully this can be a separate blog post in the future.
What I can say is that this trip was a very powerful experience for me. It was a poignant crossing of that metaphysical boundary between self and other, made very physical by the elaborate checkpoint and imposing concrete walls stretching forth as far as the eye can see. To meet with people over there and understand their lives, to eat with them, cook with them, wrestle with them (metaphorically), and most of all, listen to them, was at times challenging and trying, but also in some strange way easier than I might imagine, filled with a certain calmness, even spiritual uplift of finding self-in-other; I was entering and facing incredible conflict and contradiction, struggle, guilt, responsibility, and confusion, but that reality was still easier than fearing that reality from a place of avoidance. Because of this feeling, Sarah and I both found this experience, which was admittedly difficult and saddening at times, to be liberating and even joyful.

I will also say this. Having stood on the East side of the wall, my personal relationship to the situation has been transformed. I don't think you can really understand it before you've stood there. Regardless of your politics, regardless of your conclusions: I don't know how much you can understand if you haven't seen what Palestinians see on a daily basis; if you haven't heard their voices, their narratives, their experiences. Even if you choose not to validate these narratives and opinions, they are a part of the situation. If you don't understand them, you can't understand the views, choices, and actions that go along with them. I'm not being naive about this. I know that there are other members of the Palestinian population who have very different outlooks and agendas than the ones I spoke with. I know that I didn't get a full sample of what's over there. But I can get a basic sense of what the more extreme groups are like from afar. You don't see the ordinary lives and what they entail until you're there.

The sad part is that standing on the East side of the wall, and the transformative perspective that it provides, is something that is legally off-limits for every person that has a say in who governs Israel and, by extension, what life will look like in the West Bank. If you are an Israeli citizen, you are not permitted to go to the places we went to that day. Officially this is for the safety of the Israeli populace, and my sense is that's not wholly inaccurate; Israelis citizens would not get a warm welcome over there. Whether or not that's the entire story, the consequence is that the people who have the most influence over the state of things in the West Bank don't even know what life looks like over there.
Returning to Israel proper, seeing all the buses and ads and hustle and bustle of modern urban life, made me feel that daily life in the West Bank probably doesn't even enter too many people's consciousness, so long as there are no bombings, rockets, kidnappings, or attacks. The wall has helped to reduce those a lot, but its also added another layer onto the hardships of ordinary life for the sorts of Palestinians that I met with. When I was there, it had been several days after the birth of Husam's son and he still couldn't get to his wife's house to see him. You can say all you want about security and protective measures. When you're a decent guy with your newborn son on the other side an uncrossable wall, its harder to see it that way.


The next day we woke up early again and made our way to Hebron with the group Shovrim Shtika, Breaking the Silence. It was created by Israeli soliders who served in Hebron to share their stories about the situation there, and their roles and experiences while serving. My guide was one such soldier. Here's a video of him talking about his first mission -- to fire a grenades via machine-gun at an abandoned building in the midst of a busy downtown area, as a response to shots fired at the Jewish settlement. Sounds nice in theory -- a non-lethal but noticeable response. Let's hear what he has to say:


Eventually the response firings weren't enough. The military switched to pre-emptive firings. When that wasn't enough, they switched to shock and awe -- armoured vehicles driving down the streets, blowing up cars. All of this still got the same headline back home "Israeli troops return fire to the source of fire".
The part of Hebron that was the most shocking to me though wasn't the day-to-day military aspects. It was the settlers, the brutality with which they behaved. All I can say is that Hebron flips on its head any stereotypes or ideas I used to have about 'us', 'them', 'good guys', 'bad guys', guilt or innocence. Its hard to watch footage of settlers throwing rocks at Palestinian schoolchildren or raiding a clinic and destroying medical equipment, always with soldiers standing by to protect the settlers. Its hard to look at Jewish symbols, symbols that are supposed to represent me, spray-painted on closed and abandoned Palestinian shops as tools of intimidation and hatred. Did somebody recast the play while I wasn't looking? The settlers seem dedicated to using fear and destruction to make life as hellish as possible for the local Palestinians, and with an army wrapped around their finger, its not that hard for them. Nobody stops them. No matter how outrageous their actions, the army has no mandate and the police have long been threatened and intimidated to the point silence and acquiescence. We can go on about Israel and its moral codes, its democratic institutions, the rule of law, etc. as long as we want. Its hollow so long as Hebron continues like this.


I guess at some point you need to put that away. Not for good. Not entirely. Just to set it down for a moment -- even outrage cannot be sustained for ever. And so we gathered once again for Shabbes in Jerusalem, to decompress, to process, and to remember the good in life as well.
It was really hard to watch things happen that morally disgust you... and not have any response. Not have any action to run to, no heroic act to save the day. Change is slower than that, and travel is much, much faster than that. So I move ahead. For now.





Stage 3: Eilat and Kibbutz Ketura; Southern Israel
Mood: Vacation-like, with adventure, relaxation, and recharging
Rating: Awesome.


I caught an 8am bus South and arrived in Eilat just in time to catch the last refresher dive of the day at Manta Dive center. We had 3 days, 2 nights in the South and I needed to make the most of my time there. The deal was as follows: if I do well on the refresher dive, I could go ahead with normal diving. If I fail, I'd have to take a refresher course and spend the majority of my time there in a swimming pool.
Since I was the only refresh person, I ended up getting a private dive in the process. My instructor ran me through the basics of gear set up and underwater safety procedures and protocols. I had done some review beforehand and I remembered a whole bunch of it... but not all of it. Thank goodness for refresher requirements! We went under and did some basic emergency simulations, then explored the dive site for a bit. I passed with flying colors and signed up for the morning and afternoon dives the next day.

Meanwhile, Sarah had taken a later bus south and had set herself up with a friend at Kibbutz Keturah, home of the Arava Institute, a center for environmental studies which (amongst other things) brings together Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian students to learn about and work on the environmental issues (and associated resource management conflicts) of the region.
Yossi, one of her hosts, was in Eilat for the evening and could drive me to Ketura for the night, then take me back in for my morning dive. Sweet! I met up with Yossi (+ 5 kids, ages 4-12), helped entertain the kids for a bit and then slept the whole ride home. It had been a long day!
Arriving at Ketura, I felt a bit jealous of Sarah. Tired from several days of early wake-ups, still carrying unprocessed burdens from Hebron, I wanted also to have the space to sleep in and take it slow. I decided that I would dive the next day but skip day 3 of diving and just relax on the Kibbutz.
That night I found out that the plans had changed. Yossi's Dr's appointment got canceled and I lost my ride to Eilat. Lots of scrambling over the course of a few hours got me in a hitched ride to Eilat, just in time to MISS my 9am morning dive at Manta. But, Manta, I learned, wasn't the only game in town. It was one of those brilliant moments where things fall apart and rebuild themselves into something much, much better. I booked myself onto 10am morning dive at Dolphin Reef.

They don't call it dolphin reef for nothing.



My guide and I knelt on the sea floor 6 meters below sea level and watched the dolphins playing around us. One swam right across my my field of view, about 5 feet away. She was definitely looking at me. Probably because I had a weird mask on my face and a big piece of rubber in my mouth.
Once again I lucked out and was the only diver there for the day. I have a private guided dive for the price of a public one. My guide was great. We both were all about taking it slow and enjoying the sights, and we established that before going down in the water. That made it much easier to stay on the same page underwater with minimal sign-language communication. He also did this really cool thing where he took out his regulator and got a little fish to swim into his mouth and pick at his teeth for food. These fish generally form a symbiotic relationship with bigger fish. The bigger fish promise not to eat them, and in return the little guys eat all the food particles in the big guys' teeth. Occasionally a big fish will get hungry and eat his dentist. Then the rest of the little ones go on strike and the big fish's mouth rots away from bacterial infection. Well anyway, apparently they're branching out into humans dental services too now. I wonder if its covered by my insurance?
I got to spend a couple of hours on the premises of dolphin reef (which is a full fledged attraction for non-diving tourists as well) before the afternoon dive at Manta. I sat on the beach. I ordered lunch (they bring it right to your beach-chair) and got a hot pot of chai to ensure that I could stay out in beach clothes. It was borderline, but this was as close as I'd get to summer and I meant to make the most of it.
The afternoon dive (once again at Manta) had some great sights, in some sense cooler than the dolphins (amazingly dense schools of fish, intense and beautiful coral formations up close), but was also a bit less fun in terms of pacing; "OK, we're going to try to cover the first leg really quickly so that we can get to the interesting stuff, so just stay close and keep up, and oh, and we'll want a lot of bottom time to really see it all, so try not to breathe too much." Very beautiful sights, but a bit less relaxed than the morning dive.

I caught a bus to Ketura and was done with the shlepping, with the logistics, with the connections and schedules and everything. I could wake up as late as I wanted, spend the day wandering the kibbutz, and then walk out the front gate and take a sunset bus to Jerusalem.
And that's basically what I did. I also got to talk to some Arava students at lunch; hike up a little desert mountain with some steep drop-offs on either side (wasn't quite prepared for that); and run into Zvi Bellin, a friend from DC who also happened to randomly be at Kibbutz Ketura the same day I was. Apparently I was still in the small-world zone.



Epilogue:


The bus ride to Jerusalem was stuffy, overcrowded (ie sitting on the floor in the aisle), and long. We made it back and had some final meetings and goodbyes in Jerusalem; I spent a good few hours shopping and bargaining in the Muslim shuk in the old city, and paid a final visit to the western wall (Anna made the point that in spite of all the crazy surrounding the wall, its a place thats witnessed generations of people coming and pouring out their hearts, in the same exact location... and that regardless of its relationship to history, theres some meaning in that on its own. So I wanted to take another look). The Chabad dude moved towards me as I entered, asking if I was Jewish. "Nope", I said. I was in no mood to deal with him. I think that's the first time that I've ever actively denied my Judaism, and it just so happened to be at the holiest of all Jewish sites. I felt pretty OK about it.


The airport was a mess of lines and unending security checks. In a final hat-tip to the identity politics I was leaving behind, I was asked a lengthy series of questions on my religious identity, observances, and practices by the security agent. How do you explain trans-denominational post-halakhic havurah-style Judaism to the security agent who's asking you what synagogue you belong to in the US?


Sarah and I took our pictures with the frightfully serious looking busts of David Ben-Gurion, whose parents loved the airport so much they named their son after it. And then we were in the air.



Situation and Self:

Israel showed me other-within-self. Palestine, self-within other. Israel showed me the level of fragmentation within "my people". Palestine, long touted as alien and dangerous, showed me the way things change when you alter your notion of who is self and who is other -- who is the diverse assortment of individuals acting with varied interests and goals... and who is the monolith.



Its a land of invisible lines and boundaries that define who you are, and so many of them pass right by my doorstep. Now that I've stepped out my door to meet the people on either side, those lines have cracked apart. The divisions don't make sense when the important things fall on both sides of the line.
For all the lines in Israel, there doesn't seem to be one for the people that I agree with, respect, or enjoy. There doesn't seem to be a line out there that follows moral contours. There doesn't seem to be a line between those who honour the divine in others and those who trample it. All these 'us's and 'them's have become alien to me. They're not my choice, they don't work, and I just don't see the sense anymore. I think that's what I meant when I told the Chabad guy I wasn't Jewish. Not under your lines, not on your terms.
What's sad is that this is all happening in a place that's supposed to be holy. Mundane and profane are spread in the name of holiness. Who can pull them apart? I watch as the old stone wall releases its prayers, watch them swept away with a broom and a dustbin. One line stands firm: I am a part of this. I can't cordon myself off from this one.

See the rest of the photos: http://www.flickr.com/gp/59706944@N00/16p344

And the role of engineer will be played by: Me.

Quick update before heading off to the plane (in less than 12 hours).
I just got back from a meeting with Luc Michiels. Luc is the local Mechelen carillon builder / mechanic. I initially contacted him because I wanted some workspace and tools to work on my final project for my diploma -- building my own, personal, compact, transportable practice carillon. This is currently what the most compact practice carillons look like. Usually they're a good 50% bigger than this one, at least 3-4 feet deep, and really really heavy.
By the end of the year, its my hope to have one that I could carry out of my house and put into the backseat of an ordinary car. (Let's face it, I'm in a stage of life that involves changing residences from time to time, and space is at a premium).
Last time I met with Luc (a good couple months ago), he said, interesting idea, lets see some sketches. This was really intimidating for me because a) my ideas were nascent and foggy and b) I'm pretty bad with drawing. At that time, I felt ill equipped to sell a professional engineer (even a very nice and friendly one) on my amateur and vague ideas. So I've been working in 2 dimensions on and off for the past couple of months. I even feel more comfortable with drawing now.
I finally e-mailed him, hoping to advance the project so I could hit the ground running after Israel. We met. We talked. I showed him drawings, spoke broken dutch, and gestured wildly. And he liked the plans! He seemed impressed, and he's solidly on board. In fact, not only is he giving me workshop space, but he'll help with building materials and some of the trickier aspects of the building (for me) like making light aluminum tone bars (which is apparently routine for him).
When we meet again in mid-January, I'll have access to professional tools, professional material sources (no more local hardware shop scrounging), and professional advice. Thats one big hurdle cleared and a big boost of support going forward.

Well, that's the biggest piece of news I've got. For the past week I've had a 'vacation at home' -- no classes, no practicing, and more or less no appointments or responsibilities. Its been really nice and a chance to catch up on things like sleep, errands, etc, and to be as monastic and hermit-like as I want. Israel will involve a lot more early mornings, social evenings, and adventurous days, but I think I'm probably just about ready for that. We'll see how it goes!

So This is Christmas...

Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet liked my last entry so much that they requested a photo with me. How could I refuse?



Life has been moving along since the last posting, mostly as usual. Things have been really good out here. Its been a time of holidays, of festive winter activities, stark landscapes, and yes, more carillon study. I watched for months as people around me fell ill with the common cold, thinking I was doing pretty good from an immunity standpoint. Sadly, that era has passed, and for the first time in recent memory, I am with cold. Soon I will be heading off to Israel, where you can imagine there will be at least a few notable things to write about, but for now, here are some of the highlights from the past month.


Christmas Markets:

America could learn a thing or two about Christmas from their European counterparts. For most of December, cities throughout Northern Europe (maybe even beyond) fill their streets with music, decorations, and market stalls selling hot drinks, mulled wine, hard alcohol and all sorts of food. They're open well into the night. Ice skating rinks are set up in the market squares and the sounds of live music fill the streets. Its a full-fledged powerhouse of life and liveliness in the depths of the dark and cold winter. From Bruges to Dordrecht to Brussels, and even Mechelen, I've been soaking up these seasonal celebrations so much that I imagine it will be hard to go through the rest of winter without them.
One of the biggest highlights of these Christmas Markets for me has been the ice skating. I used to do this a lot as a child and its been great to get back into it. I've already gone 3 times, and aside from the Dordrecht experience (pitted ice, hundreds of little kids to weave around, and traffic every which way across the ice), its been really great. By the end of the last time I was really in good control and could dash around the rink without too much fear of losing control. Maybe its time to work on some jumps and spins? Check out this show-off from the Brussels Christmas market -- not too shabby, huh?



Carillon Travel:
I mentioned a couple of upcoming trips in the last update -- I went to Brugges a few Sundays ago, and had a really rough time with the instrument. Yes, apparently this one is also really really hard to play (why don't they tell me these things in advance?). That trip ended up being more fun for the ice skating and city wandering than for the carillonning.
The big mega-trip of the month though, was to visit Boudewijn Zwart in the Netherlands. Boudewijn is a incredibly skilled and virtuosic player who I got to meet a few years ago, first when I visited him with the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs in 2005, and then in Florida for his concert at the International Carillon Festival 2007. He invited me to come visit again, but I didn't know what was in store for me until he sent me the itinerary for my two day visit: 8 carillons, spread across the entire Netherlands, in little more than 24 hours.
We drove. We climbed. We played. We drank and we feasted. And then we did it all again. By the last climb of the last tower I was feeling a bit faint, but I made it and finished in good form.
Its pretty amazing what this guy does. 5 concerts Friday. 4 concerts Saturday. 2 concerts most other days. Not to mention playing organ in church on Sunday (just for fun), studying piano, and running special programs for kids to get them excited about music and the carillon, with his very own personal travelling carillon. (we gave it a try early on Saturday morning before picking up the tour again. It was bizarre to hear bells from some dude's driveway in the countryside. I asked if we should keep it down on account of the neighbors, but he replied that they were used to it by now)

And all sorts of other miscellaneous projects. His take on this? "Its a terrible life. Play music, drink beer, eat good food? Horrible!".
Highlights of the tour include seeing the elaborate brickwork of the inside of the church in Issjelstein (this is the support structure for a brick staircase!), eating "harring" the traditional way (pick up raw-picked fish by the tail, dangle it over your head, and bite.), seeing Boudewijn's living room (complete with 2 grand pianos, carillon practice keyboard, electric organ, harpsichord, and a good half-dozen other keyboard curios), walking through Christmas markets before and after the various concerts, sampling the fare and enjoying the atmosphere, seeing all the locals kids running up to meet Boudewijn before his concert, and of course, playing loads of wonderful instruments and watching Boudewijn in action. Here are a few clips to give you an idea.




Exams:
Initially I wasn't too nervous about the mid-term performance exams at the school. After all, they didn't really count for anything. But as they got closer I realized it would be a good opportunity to practice performing under pressure. After all, G!d willing I do have finals coming down the road, and maybe even a couple of carillon competitions. So a couple of days beforehand, I started preparing in earnest.
In the morning I played the Chopin Fantasie Impromptu for my piano exam. I did really well given the difficulty of the piece, and it felt like some sort of rite of passage, my first piano performance as an adult and a graded one at that! They said I had a few too many note errors but I felt pretty good about it.
Then I went up into the tower to warm up and wait for the call to say that the jury was ready. The call came about an hour later (!?) and I played what I thought was also a solid performance. The biggest piece of feedback I got on this was that I need to work on the unity of longer and larger chunks of music so that the piece flows as several complete ideas, rather than lots of 8- or 16-measure phrases. (I thought this was a little funny because in lessons its not uncommon for Eddy to stop me every 16 measures or so to give feedback). Still, it made a lot of sense to me and after a day or two's digestion, I started to see the ways to work to get there. It actually felt like a nice turning point in my development. I get to "bank" all the technical and microscopic work that I've been doing and move on to the big picture stuff.


Zen Playing, Beginner's Playing:
The next day, while playing for Geert, I got one of those paradigm-shift corrections.
Some background: I think the last paradigm-shifting correction I got was from Jo Haazen 3 years ago. He talked about giving pieces rhythmical structure by accenting downbeats and intentionally un-accenting upbeats. He goes a bit too far with it, but it can produce some really good effects in the right context.
Geert's correction, 3 years later, was the counterweight to Jo's. In legato phrases, every note, downbeat or otherwise, needs to have the same stress (or smoothly crescendoing / diminuendoing) -- otherwise it suggests that you've broken the line and that you're bringing in a new idea. It works brilliantly, but it made me start to wonder... 5 years ago I'm pretty sure that that's how I played the line that we were talking about. Then I met Jo, and his accent system penetrated my brain to the extent that I couldn't play an upbeat without subduing it. Now, 3 years later, thanks to a good correction, I'm playing the line sensibly again. Am I better off?
I think there's something dangerous about playing with too many "should's" in your head. If you don't "know" anything, if you have beginner's mind, all you can do is listen and play what sounds good. When you "know better", it takes you out of your ears and into your head. That's not a good place to play from. Its a place that had me playing a simple legato line wrong for 3 years, in spite of being able to play it right before that, in spite of knowing of some level that it didn't sound right. And I wonder if I'm any better off having two counterbalancing principles in my head that let me play the line right, versus having mystery in my head that forces me to listen. For a while I wondered if I had made a mistake by introducing formal education into my development. The words of Gordon Slater echoed in my head -- "Don't go to Mechelen, just keep doing whatever it is you're doing".
There's a lot of new information here and a lot of corrections to incorporate into my playing, so most of what I'm doing in front of the carillon right now is thinking-ful and intention-ful -- I'm trying to make something specific happen to match the feedback I've gotten from my teachers. I believe that this is both important for my development and, paradoxically, a bad habit that I will have to learn to break once I graduate. To put a variation on an old Jewish saying, "when the mind stands, the ears fall".
I can't go back to pure beginner's mind, nor could I even when Gord advised me to stay away (I had already met Jo, had plenty of master classes, etc). But I will have a lot of work to do when I get back to the states. Not only will I have to digest what I've learned here, but I'll have to get it into my body and then CLEAR IT OUT OF MY HEAD. I'll have to work my way back to just listening. My ears got me here, and in the end they'll be what will let me make something useful of what I've learned here.
The itchy thought in the back of my head is that that's not even good enough. I ought to be able to do this now. I ought to be able to separate between practice (thinking) and performance (listening), so that I don't spend an entire year building the habit of thought-y playing. But so far I haven't been able to succeed there. I don't know if its a discipline issue or if there's simply too much new information flowing in per unit playing time to make that work. But I think that's the needs to be the lofty target.

Well, I think that's about it for this issue. Check out pictures on flickr -- this new set has a lot of pretty ones:


http://www.flickr.com/gp/59706944@N00/4s19C3

And if you're still reading and enjoying, please drop a comment in the comment section -- its good to know there are people still out there :)

Coming up next time, New Year's adventures in Israel!

And now to send you off, a quick video of something you don't see everyday. (And if you look closely, you can see a pizza hut in the background)

Monday, Monday!

OK, so in the spirit of shorter and more frequent blog entries... Things are really looking up these days, and here are some of the reasons why:

-Treasa came back from Ireland today, which brightens everything up. And the sun came out this morning, which has a similar effect. Call me crazy, but I'm actually really digging this Belgian weather right now (though it may not be typical). One day its sunny with all sorts of changing cumulus clouds speeding by, then the next day or even that night, its pouring down torrential rain. Today was very very sunny (I mean now its torrential, but for most of daylight it was sunny). And since I was 444 steps up playing the carillon, I decided to take the extra 70 or so to visit the roof and the balcony. The views were beautiful, you could see all the way to Brussels, and when the automatic play chimed out the 00:45, the tower seemed to shake as the sound echoed out over the entire city, bouncing back at me from every rooftop near and far and every distance in-between, so that it almost sounded like the whole thing was played in tremolo. Sometimes playing the carillon makes you feel like you're off in some distant and unnoticed corner of the existence (who's ever heard of the carillon), but here it felt like I I was in the center of, and on top of, the entire world.

More about the weather, it gets dark early, which makes the daylight that much more precious, but which also really creates a hibernational atmosphere. This is the perfect place to be working on living a quieter life and hunkering down and focusing on music. I guess the thing I fear is constansy, the never-ending, unchanging, grey overcast with occasional drizzles weather that people warned me about.

-My practice in the tower was spectacular -- I was really right about the whole go back to focusing on the performance act, it made my playing 10 times better, and with some new macro-scale ideas from Geert -- thinking about actively suppressing accompaniment and voicing melody (on the note axis) and thinking of fast passages in terms of waves building to a point, rather than sets of notes (on the time axis) -- I've been able to take the performance act further than I used to. Add in the fact that I'm just about technically competent on the Passacaglia now and it made for a killer hour or so on the carillon.

-I finally got serious about getting in gear with travelling, and what should come into my inbox but a reply to an old e-mail I sent to Boudewijn Zwart in the Netherlands, asking about a visit to his carillons. He invited me for next weekend. And Treasa, Paolo and I were planning on going to Brugge tomorrow, but I found out that they play the carillon on Sundays so we're going this weekend instead, and we'll get to play there as well. So in one day I went from 0 to 2 trips around Belgium and the Netherlands in the next two weeks.

-I'm also looking forward to going into Brussels to checking out an exhibit called "Le Grand Atelier", which "follows the journeys of famous and lesser-known artists between the 5th and 18th centuries, their ideas, artworks, and patrons... without attempting to be exhaustive, this exhibition focuses on 14 typically European artistic phenomena that spread across Europe like shock waves." This sounds like just about the most fascinating thing to me ever right now. I've been getting more and more excited about art and music here. The Reubens house, the cathedrals, the orchestral and choral music, it simply amazes and inspires me what an immense wealth of human creativity exists in this world. Its funny, in Washington it becomes easy to focus on all that is wrong with the world. Here in Belgium, it seems much easier to focus on all that's right, and for me right now, this is what its about. I can't seem to get enough of the stories, trappings, and works of people who were living out creative lives. Art, history, philosophy, culture, are coming alive in a new way out here.


-I feel like I'm getting my mind around my relationship with work. I like being busy and working hard. Its not that I grudgingly accept it. I could've had an easier thesis topic but I chose a heavy one that I was passionate about. And that's good. Especially good, since I'm out here and have the very rare privilege of getting to work almost exclusively on things that are interesting to me. At the same time, there's a sort of joy in just lying down, putting on music, and staring up at the ceiling while rain pounds my skylights. The great thing is that I can do both. In fact, in some sense, I have to do both. Otherwise, neither one works.

Some pictures from the tower-top today:

Zwarte Pieten and Other Adventures

There comes a moment
in this grey and sober place
when the overcast night's sky glows faint purple
and the stillness of this aging town
becomes a soundscape upon which a moment's rainfall plays upon my eardrums, then slowly recedes to the night's sleepy winds.

My tower stands guard with the night
as drizzles and clearing pass overhead like idle thoughts in the northern reaches of consciousness.
The moon shines bright, then not at all
And I will sleep
And let this moment pass on its way.



A day or two after the last entry, everything sort of coalesced. I decided to let the mega-to-do list go. I was here on a fellowship to study carillon and I could pour my energy into that. That would be my job. The rest could come in, time permitting, as leisure to counterbalance my carillon life.
I practiced vigorously in 4-hour bouts, getting up from the bench only to take a quick sip of tea and then return. And it felt great. At least at first. But then I guess I sort of burned myself out, and to make it worse, a week later at lessons I felt like it didn't even pay off all that much. Despair set in.
I met with Luc Michiels about getting workshop space for my engineering stuff, but across the language barrier, all I got was 'why don't you make some design drawings and we'll get together then and see where we are'. I got intimidated by the whole design drawing thing (I'm not a 'real engineer' like him, and felt like I was being asked to prove that I had good ideas up front, where really I had vague notions that needed to be fleshed out by working with my hands). I sat down to do a couple of drawings and was really disappointed by what came out and frightened that I wouldn't have anything to show Luc, that the project would get stopped dead in its tracks by my horrible drawing.
I was eventually rescued by a trip to Brussels for a thanksgiving dinner party, and a BAEF fellowship dinner honoring our director. By the end of that I felt able, even excited to return to my work. Things were up and down for a bit, but I feel better about my playing, I AM moving forward on the European carillon tour, the thesis designs and plans are going in a good direction, and I'm making progress on figuring out a good balance of how to use my time out here. Not quite there, but making progress. For a couple days I was able to stick to putting myself off-task at 10pm and that was really helpful. Its funny, left to my own devices I'll just keep going with to-do list items straight until (and past) bedtime trying to get it all in.

Today I'm starting to think in terms of 2 hr/day practicing, to see how that rhythm works for me. I also realized, during a visit to Geert in Antwerp, that I have fallen out of the habit of creating music. So much of my time and energy in the last few weeks has focused on technical execution and so little on the performance act, the intense attention and intention demanded by it, the focused listening, relaxing, the dedication to a high quality musical product. Lately I've just been in practice mindset -- lets get up there and work on getting the notes, work on the technical, premeditated musicality, faster here, louder here, pause here, but without much attention to how it sounds. And I'm starting to think that such a focus isn't really good. Before I thought of it as setting aside that aspect of things to focus on technique for a bit. Now I see it as regressing and building bad habits by not playing regularly in a performance frame of mind. So I'm going to try to give more attention to that in my practice as well.
And my thesis, well loads of ideas are flowing, I've been learning a lot and doing a lot of internet research on sensors, acoustics, etc, trying to figure out whats out there and what makes sense for my design. That said, I really have no idea if my plans are feasible or what will happen once I start actually building and that's adding a bit of nerves to the whole process.
And I'm (still) finding that keeping balance in the way I use time is tricky out here. I'm not used to working on year-long projects without the steps nicely broken down for me, and I'm not sure how well I can break down the steps of "become as much of a better carillonneur as I can with the time I'm given" other than trying to set a sustainable practice schedule and keep working on the right things.
Well, that's the basic journey from then 'till now, but there were some interesting stops along the way:


Lier: I went to Lier (about 15-20 minutes away by train) to play at Geert's carillon there. My wanderings around the city were mostly fruitless, but I did eventually find my way to a carnival with a beautiful view of the historic cathedral. Just another example of old meets new.




BAEF Dinner: This was a banquet honoring Dr. Boulpaep, the director of the BAEF organization which is supporting me in my studies. It was loads of fun and I got to learn more about the organization, the fellowship and its history, and meet other fellows. Plus, cocktail hour and 3 course dinner with wine flowing the whole way through. And before the meal, a concert from Liebrecht Vanbeckefort, a Belgian BAEF alum and winner of the Queen Elisabeth piano competition. This guy was really amazing. I mean REALLY amazing. And I was front row left, in the perfect spot to see his hands. He reminded me just how well people can make music -- technical limitations are no excuse. He had clearly blasted through loads of those and was doing things on the piano (tastefully) that I hadn't imagine humans to be capable of.
During dinner one of the speeches was given in 4 languages. I don't mean that the content was repeated 4 times, I mean that the speaker divided his speech into 4 parts and gave each one in a different language. And it seemed like the majority of the audience was parsing and reacting to the entire speech. I could follow 2 1/4 of those languages. Definitely not in the US anymore.


Handbell class: This is getting better and funner all the time. I don't think Elena actually stumbled onto my blog, but for whatever reason, it seems she's has a bit more of a human touch lately and we're all enjoying it. Its our one shot at social music and so its a really nice part of the week in that sense. And I feel like I even get some ideas / techniques out of it that I can apply to my music in the tower.


Hang-gliding: I had my second hang-gliding lesson, though by now thats 2 weeks ago! Well, it was really great. Because I'm heavier than the average student, I end up using the tandem glider. The plus is that I get to fly much more often than everybody else, since its the gliders, not the people which take turns. The downside is that it weighs about 90 pounds, and just like sledding, you have to carry it back up the hill before the next ride (and sometimes the wind fights you the whole way up). I was sore for days after this lesson. Also, I'm actually a bit too light for the tandem glider so I get a bit of an out of control ride. It takes a few seconds for my actions to affect the course of the thing, something I learned the hard way with my first crash landing (over-corrected to the right). My second crash landing happened when I let the nose tip up, thereby trading all my speed for altitude. Bad trade. But initially you don't really have any kinesthetic awareness of the glider because its above you and you're looking down. All your info comes from subtle changes of position of the bars you're holding.
Mid day I felt completely out of control -- every takeoff felt like diving headfirst into a raging river of death. The bottom of the training hill is full of puddles and big mudpits, so my shoes and my jeans up to my knees were completely mud-saturated. Its probably the only hill in all of Belgium though, so you take what you can get. But by the end of the day I was flying pretty solidly. Mind you, these are flights that take you 10-15 feet off the ground max. But trying to land on your feet when you're strapped to a 90 lb piece of metal that's designed to follows every whim of the wind is no piece of cake. And I haven't yet been able to really enjoy the feeling of flight because I've been too busy trying to hold things together. I hope as I get better at controlling the thing, and as I start taking longer flights, that I'll be able to breathe a bit and enjoy the view.


Sinterklaas: They have Christmas on Dec 25, but on on Dec 6th they have a festival built around someone called Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas?). Jean, my waffle guy, gave me the rundown. He lives in Spain and comes to Belgium via boat with his assistant Zwarte Piet. You could translate his name literally as Black Pete, but since 'Piet' is a name with certain extra connotations in Dutch, a more accurate rendering would be "Black Dick". Zwarte Piete is responsible for stuffing the bad children into his sack. Zwarte Piet's isn't actually black (at least according to more modern explanations), but his face is because he comes in through the chimneys. Still, somehow his clothing is spotless. And its only this clothing, reminiscent of flamboyant old European dress, that helped me distinguish the Sinterklaas pageant that I saw a week ago from a old school American minstrel show. Well, you can read more about Sinterklaas and the dubious racial origins of Zwarte Piet here. Or just watch the videos of the dancing Zwarte Piets from the pageant I saw.

Clock Museum: We took a tour of a clock museum last Saturday. The clock museum appears to be somebody's house, but there are 3-4 big rooms completely filled wall to wall with hundreds of different historical pieces, the most intriguing mechanically inventive clocks you've ever seen. The tour took way to long, like 2.5 hours, and it was mostly in Dutch. The guy occasionally translated snippets, but there was no time to give a full translation. So it was a bit of a bust except that a) it convinced me that you can do almost anything with mechanical systems if you put your mind to finding a clever way to do it (a good reminder), and b) it gave me plenty of time and inspiration with which to gaze off and think up design ideas for my thesis work.


Eddy's Birthday: On Wednesday, Mariko whispered to me -- its Eddy's birthday tomorrow... I got him some chocolates. Are you in? I was in. I rode quickly to the store and got a couple bottles of wine and we concocted a last minute surprise party for him in the school. The next day, Eddy, me Paolo, and Patrick, a financial guy and a friend of Eddy's from elementary school, went out for drinks. We ended up back at Patrick's place, a beautiful, swanky place, where we drank champagne, and played foozball. Somehow, we didn't end up leaving until 2:30 am. Not a bad way to spend a birthday.


Antwerp and Reubens: I finally made it out to Antwerp. It took my 2.5 bloody months to do it (its like 20 minutes away by train), but I did it. I met Geert at the cathedral and we went up to have a play on the carillon. It was my first Hemony carillon this year. The Hemony brothers were to the carillon what Stradivarius was to the violin. They discovered the secret to the complex tuning process of bells, made about 50 or 60 instruments, then died with their secret. It wasn't discovered again for another 300 years. Their carillons are only found in Europe, and their instruments are mean-tone tuned. This basically means they sound funky if you play in keys with lots of sharps or flats, but they sound more beautiful than modern instruments when you play in simple keys. The keyboard makes a lot of clattering noise which domiates what you hear in the playing cabin, but I went to have a walk around the belfry while Geert was playing Greensleeves, and the sound of it was just a complete wonder. I didn't get my camera out in time to record it, but I recorded him improvising on Danny Boy (not as nice a sound cause its in a major key and the bells have minor third overtones -- but it'll at least give you a feel for the place).

Then I visited the home of Peter Paul Reubens and got to take in his personal art collection. All I can say is wow. You should definitely check it out. But since not all of you can check it out, I snapped a few illegal photos for your benefit while the guards weren't looking. Don't worry, I didn't use a flash or anything :)




Well, that's about it -- Sorry both about the length of this post, and about the long radio silence. I'm going to try to write smaller entries more frequently from now on.

New Photos on: http://www.flickr.com/gp/59706944@N00/7P4qTk

Wednesday Wednesday

Surgeon General's Warning: If you are the sort of person who gets nauseous from listening to people who have it great complain about their problems, read this entry at your own risk. For those of you who remain: consider it a glance into 'that which is', usually more interesting than 'that which should be'. Consider it my catharsis, or consider it a foil for your own thoughts, or consider it a call for new ideas and ways of living. Take what you will and leave the rest. If there is a way for us to help each other, help to make it so.

---

Belgian weather has been doing this strange thing lately. One minute its partly cloudy w/ chunks of blue sky. Next minute its overcast and raining hard with loads of wind. A few minutes later it stops. Then it'll get drizzly for a while. Then back to the blue skies for a little bit. Repeat.
Today felt sort of like that. Lots of ups and downs and all things in between.
My confidence as a musician has been low lately. I went to Leuven with Eddy yesterday, expecting to perform well, as I had been doing (in my opinion) on St. Rombouts. When we arrived, we discovered we were taking up a tour group of about 15 people with us. The tour group had champagne and snacks, which was a nice plus, but the big minus of the evening was discovering that I was significantly handicapped on this different instrument.
OK, I was getting a bit haughty. While Eddy played I prepared myself to sit down at the keyboard and blow them away with my American musical charm, make them get "all quiet inside" as the Belgian journalism student said a few weeks ago. It didn't go that way. Sometimes you go to a new carillon and the keys are spaced differently or slightly in the wrong place. Not here. This was perfectly aligned for me, and it was lighter than St. Rombouts by far, but somehow, I just couldn't control it. People have since confirmed that I wasn't crazy, that there's something deceptively difficult about that instrument, but as far as I could tell at the time, I had fallen into the trap of getting good at a single instrument (St. Rombouts) while losing my ability to adapt to new instruments. In the carillon world, that simply doesn't cut it. I felt like my playing had regressed a good 3 years and the crowd kept talking right through my playing. I had been planning to do concert touring this upcoming summer in Europe, but the Leuven experience made me seriously question whether I'd be able to do that without burning every bridge on the continent for future playing opportunities.
Today I had lessons on St. Rombouts carillon with Eddy. I had been studying the Jos Lerinckx Passacaglia pretty hard the past week, and felt like it had come together pretty well on the practice carillon. I hadn't had a chance to try it out on the real instrument though. The lesson was to be my first time. The Passacaglia, for info's sake, is an amazing work of art, it was written by a priest when his father died, its really dark and intense (I've heard that most of his other work is a bit too light and happy), and it does an amazing job of capturing all the different emotions of mourning, from dull aching grief to glimmers of hope to overwhelming walls-caving-in washes of anger and fear, etc. Its over 8 minutes long and really really technically challenging. Like triplets all over the pedal-board at 120 beats per measure challenging. OK, I guess it went pretty well considering, but I got loads and loads of corrections and some of them are going to be pretty hard to implement. Its going to push the limits of my technical abilities. Which is good. But after a whole hour's lesson full of stopping and correcting and frustration, an hour of being told what needed to happen to make the piece musical and being unable to execute it, set to the soundtrack of the overwhelming emotions of death, I was pretty exhausted. Yesterday I felt like I could play St. Rombouts but not other carillons... now it felt like I couldn't even cut it on St. Rombouts!
I was exhausted all throughout lunch. Piano lessons with Eddy came afterwards. There were ups and downs. Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu may be too much for my current technical abilities on the piano. That remains to be seen. But the music was at least happier, and Eddy actually had praise for the middle section (OK, he said that the middle section was the stronger than the rest of the piece, but its something to go on).
I'm starting to observe a trend at the school, I don't know if its a conservatory thing or a Belgian thing, or a European thing, or just in this school, but people here seem oriented towards teaching music, not towards teaching people. Maybe its just my particular needs. But I think that fleshy, emotional human beings need more than musical correction to develop. They need encouragement, reassurance, etc. Something to go on to give a basic sense that, even though the focus is on what needs improving, there are a wealth of things that HAVE IMPROVED, things are on the right track... something.
I saw this happen from the outside during my hand-bell class on Monday. Elena, the teacher, has supernatural hearing. We'll reach the end of a 2 minute passage and she'll tell you exactly which notes were missing, too loud, early, etc. and who was responsible. Even subtle things, like one note missing from a big chord, she can hear and describe succinctly. She amazes me, and that sort of clear perception is an invaluable when it comes to helping musicians develop. But her approach to correction is more suited towards computers than people. We stop, she tells us what went wrong, and asks us to try again. As far as I can tell, we will repeat the process until the piece is perfect.
Now I've taken pretty well to the hand-bells, and while I still make mistakes, I spend less time being corrected and more time watching others get corrected. So I get to float above the process and see it for what it is. She's never abusive, she even likes to say that we're a team, and we can make mistakes, its not a concert. But the sheer volume of faults named, combined with her businesslike haste to list them off and try again, and the dearth of praise (beyond 'good, you've fixed that problem, on to the next one') seems violently detrimental to one's creative and artistic health.
I remember being amazed by Jeffrey Douma, director of the Yale Glee club, who had an incredible sense of how to nurture creative artistry from fleshy beings. His corrections were great, but the emotional intelligence he brought to bear when giving them, his ability to be in tune with what the choir needed at that moment, whether it was encouragement, technical correction, or liberation from the rigors of technical awareness, seemed just as superhuman as Elena's ear. They don't seem to have that out here. Well, maybe there's one exception. I think Geert has a bit of a sense for it.

My last class of the day is composition with Geert. We played through my composition; the one I had worked so hard on; the one I had shown to Eddy who sort of gasped and said that it was too hard to play right on a carillon; the one I partially tried on St Rombouts and found, to my horror, that the minor 3rd overtones perverted the sound of the suspensions that I had developed on the xylophonesque practice carillon; the one that felt like it might've just been 20-30 hours wasted. Geert might've shuddered a little bit at the looks of it too, but we played it through.
"It looks harder than it actually is," said Geert. "I can see why Eddy saw it and got worried. But its easier than my 4-hands stuff and I think once you get it scored out neatly in Sibelius and we study it, it'll work. And you've got to realize that if these parts are played pianissimo like you want, the minor 3rd overtones only show up in the cabin. The audience can't hear that." It didn't relieve all my worries, but it got me back in the game.
The other order of business was my summer tour. Geert had been encouraging about touring before, so I decided to consult with him about who to ask, how to ask, all of that other stuff. I showed him the list of carillons and he said, "well, first off I'd strongly encourage you to enter the Dutch carillon guild's performance competition, they have one every year." Huh? "Do I stand a chance?" "Oh yeah." He went down the list of Belgian carillons that I had printed off, ticked off ones that had summer series that I should try for, etc. And then offered me my first concert, in the summer series at his carillon in Lier. At this point I didn't really care if was hollow praise or genuine. I needed something.
There's the classic story of bands making it big and then cracking under the pressure and I guess I'm starting to understand what that might be like. Some days I feel like one of America's next carillon superstars, other days I feel like a phony who somehow survived an American tour and is about the get a severe reality check this side of the pond. I really can't tell. There's got to be something to the sort of praise I've gotten, but at the same time I really do feel inexperienced, and unprepared for the sort of standards that I'm imagining to exist in the world. The messages I get about my playing are really conflicting -- sometimes they're the sort of praise that seems too good to be true. Other times its error after error after error after error. And I worry that that divide will only grow greater the further into 'success' one gets -- I know that I would never be overly critical of a student in the midst of development, but still take a guilty pleasure in critiquing the playing of the folks with the bigger names (hah, is that how you interpret that passage? I could do better than that!).
OK, Ideally its not about being good or bad or anything. Its about making music, and holding on that aspect of things so that, people's evaluations of you become beside the point. You get to play and that's all you need. In that sense, too much praise can be as deadly as too little. I shouldn't be so wrapped up in figuring out how I'm doing, but I guess I'm sort of entangled because I've already taken the praise. Taken it and used it to get me places that I wouldn't have gone otherwise. A concert tour of the US, for example. Plans for a European counterpart. Building things on the praise, you start to get attached to it, because without it, things seem to collapse. "Yes I did an American tour, but I got the gigs on the basis of a lucky GCNA performance. I probably played poorly on the tour and didn't realize and now that's the end of it. If I don't stop myself now I'll burn my European bridges too." Writing it helps to understand it and get some distance. The goal now is to disentangle myself from good / bad and reattach myself to music. That way, my lessons will return to adventures in learning how to create bigger and better things, and cease being the evaluation ground where I am told my value as a musician or a person.

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I quit trapeze a week or two ago because I realized it was an extra direction that I was getting pulled in, and that I didn't really have the energy for it, especially on my busy Wednesdays. But still things seem full.
We hear about life-threatening addictions -- to drugs, alcohol, etc. Its finally become clear what my problem is: I have a life-threatening addiction to life. By that I mean that there are so many things that I want to experience and do, that the process of trying to get it all in threatens to suck the life out of the whole bundle. For example -- right now, I want to do the following things: Finish this blog entry; Plan my trip to Lier tomorrow, including a visit to Geert's carillon and general sight-seeing around the town; get in touch with Luc Michiels, who is willing to give me workshop space to try and design and build (cross your fingers) a cheap, semi-portable practice instrument; get moving on that work, as its going to be my thesis work for the year and I've barely started; do some serious practice to get on top of the Passacaglia for next week, including getting up into St Rombouts a couple times; spend some good time on the piano as well (I've been neglecting this); broaden my repertoire to include more baroque music, contemporary / atonal compositions, and popular / familiar music; get a move on exploring Europe while its in my backyard; e-mail out for summer concerts and put together a summer tour; decide if I want to compete in carillon competitions; be there for folks back home; actually get a good strong tai chi practice going; consider carefully adding a once-a-month hebrew school teaching gig in January (only 6 times total, and I'm really curious to try some teaching / mentoring / working with kids to see if I might like that / want that to be part of my work in the future); make plans for christmas break, possibly involving a trip to Israel?; spend time with people; read; relax, watch a movie from time to time; look after Treasa and Paolo who are also swimming in the emotionally challenging waters of the school; put together some social carillon events (like group-rings) to try to get a bit more of a collegial feel to the place;.... not to mention the waiting list: figure out what to do next year; do more writing; leave time for introspection; keep blogging; continue with composition; try out new activities / skills to get a sense for what I might want to do next year; get back on top of a regular exercise regimen;..... and of course the long-term waiting list: write a novel, become a famous professor, travel the world, spend a few years in monastic life, make lots of clever inventions, help put simplicity, health, and sufficiency back into American culture (irony anyone?), narrow the income gap, produce all sorts of art and music, work with and inspire wide swaths of the next generation, achieve inter-religious peace and co-operation, come up with a coherent philosophical and/or social and economic treatise/theory and publish it, have children, be a great parent, a great partner, one with lots of time and patience, keep reading and learning, keep having adventures, get involved in meditation, achieve a widespread practical de-construction of the oppressive aspects of our society's constructions of gender, stay fit and able well into old age, make enough money to enable me to travel, sample all the good culinary concoctions the world has to offer, and oh yes, teach myself to relax and live slowly.
Its an amazing set of things I get to do this year, even this week. Really amazing. Reading it lightens the load a bit. But it becomes really easy for me to take on the emotional load of trying to get it all in, feeling like this year, this one little shimmering window of time, is really my best and possibly only chance to do it all, to really develop deeply as a carillonneur, to travel Europe and have adventures, to be free to leisurely spend time with people, to have the time and space to try small doses of new things (like teaching) that might give me a sense for what I'd like to do next year, to have the opportunity to do an engineering project that excites me, even though nobody's going to pay to have it done, to really get a good tai chi practice going, etc. This period was supposed to give me the time and space to do the things that a full-time job crowded out. Now all of those things are crowding each other out. And its that frenetic plate-spinning dance of desperation, that feeling of need to make sure that I get everything in during this brief window of opportunity, that makes it possible for me to write a list of the things that fill my life, each and every one of them a jewel, and still feel heavy-hearted. This is a high-class problem. This is a life-threatening addiction to life. Any recovered addicts out there to point the way?

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"Its the American way. We start trying to change who we are before 'who we are' has even started to develop. -- Paraphrase from Mike Mills talking about his movie "Thumbsucker"