(American) Thanksgiving

This (American) Thanksgiving I’m asking myself what I’m thankful for. I’m thankful for my partner, who is an excellent cook (which is especially apparent this year), I’m thankful for our pets and the comfort they provide, and I’m thankful I can sit at my desk and write from a place of stability.

However, in reflecting on all of the things for which I’m thankful, I can’t help but confront how lonely I feel this Thanksgiving. This year I was not able to go home to see family. I’ve felt distant from friends for months. I feel the need to reach out, a rarer desire for me outside of family, and I thought it would be fun to try starting a blog. I’ve always been terrible at self-promotion and this feels like a quieter way to share how I spend my days and what I’m thinking. Not just lately, but over the past few years. A whisper from a hill rather than a trumpet blast from a mountaintop.

This coming Sunday is the beginning of Advent. It reminds me of last Advent and preparing Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata with Redeemer’s choir and Gargoyle Brass (pictures below) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Pinkham’s birth. I had also recently finished my Advent Mass that makes use of the Wachet Auf hymn tune and was careful to avoid any “banishment of darkness” language in the candle lighting liturgy for the Advent wreath. I felt like I was firing on all cylinders; I was operating not just as a composer but as a conductor, organist, and liturgist. It truly felt like the music I was writing had a purpose: music meant to be sung by lay people (a true example of Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik). This is perhaps the most useful I have felt in a long time.

This is a drastically different focus than I had while I was in school. Although I still enjoy writing music that surprises or pushes the envelope, I realize that I don’t have as much to say in that realm as I thought I did. Pieces of mine that I find were once very important to me (and that you will not find on this site) now feel empty. And although I’m feeling fulfilled as a Director of Music, I feel that I cannot bridge the world from my old life to my new one.

This year, I’m focusing on finishing Rubrical Expressions: a wind ensemble and organ consortium that I’m very excited about, but am also feeling the loneliness of sitting at a desk hovering over manuscript paper and a computer. My deep hope is that this is a moving experience for all of the consortium members and musicians involved. Right now, those members come from programs in Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma and I’m so looking forward to traveling to make as many performances as I can. I can’t wait for this feeling of stasis that I hold to be radically upset!

This is also my second American Thanksgiving as a US citizen and the first presidential election I’ve been able to participate in. Regardless of political leanings, I’m shocked at the deep division of the country. Understanding what a tense election this was going to be, I followed in the footsteps of an organist who worked at a church that was a polling place (in the UK I think, during the Brexit vote). As I remember it, he played so that voters could have a place to calmly gather themselves before or after voting. I did the same at Redeemer this month, improvising on and off from 1pm-6pm. We left our candle set up from the previous Sunday’s All Saints service and did have a few visitors who took advantage of the space and light and warmth.