30 November 2012
29 November 2012
26 November 2012
22 November 2012
21 November 2012
Out and about on Sunday
It's also the feast of Christ the King, one of those feasts of recent institution that it's tempting to regard as the last gasp of the feudal order. I've often wondered if this is really a replay of themes from Ascension day, in much the same way that August 6 is an elaboration of the second Sunday in Lent, although that might be a reflection of how the three-year lectionary oscillates between various themes. This year we get stuck firmly in the praetorium with the "my kingdom is not of this world" reading, which is original to the feast. This is a challenging reading to think through in terms of good organ music for the liturgy; where does one start? Here's my best answer for this year.
Agnus Dei -- Frank Martin
Allegro Giocoso (Op. 150, No. 7) Camillle Saint-Saens
18 November 2012
Unusual bridal request
I played for a wedding yesterday, and when I met with the couple a few weeks ago they had an unusual request. I usually say yes to a clear and definite idea and this was one I simply couldn't resist, so here's the original, followed by someone-not-me playing it on the organ...
17 November 2012
The time of year
In Safeway it's been Christmas for a little while already. At the end of October, there was a distinct feeling of dissonance as imported Hallowe'en "traditions" vied for aisle space with way-way early Yuletide goods. But now it's just back to the pre-emptive flogging of festive paraphernalia. This is that odd time of the year, where we're stuck between seasons. Summer has arrived -- at least psychologically
-- since the Melbourne Cup was run. People are beginning to see that
the end of the year is near, and in a week or two the end-of-year
break-up party round will be starting up.
If you sing in a choir, then you'll most likely be getting into the swing of knocking off the easy bits of your coming carols services and other December commitments. I've been practicing carols with a couple of choirs lately, although things only seem to start coming together after the racing carnival is done. This year I only have to worry about getting the performance of a few things to work well, rather than generating the structure for the whole shebang, as has happened in the last few years.
The hardest task in any carol for most choirs is remembering that there are vowels in the phrases below. Best to practice it nice and s l o w l y...
If you sing in a choir, then you'll most likely be getting into the swing of knocking off the easy bits of your coming carols services and other December commitments. I've been practicing carols with a couple of choirs lately, although things only seem to start coming together after the racing carnival is done. This year I only have to worry about getting the performance of a few things to work well, rather than generating the structure for the whole shebang, as has happened in the last few years.
The hardest task in any carol for most choirs is remembering that there are vowels in the phrases below. Best to practice it nice and s l o w l y...
15 November 2012
Sir Douglas Mawson waited patiently at the door
St Bartholomew's Op Shop, Burnley Street, Richmond. And yes, that really is the name of the Jack Russell in the foreground...
14 November 2012
Truth in the inward parts
It's been a big couple of months for the churches, with a couple of state parliament-level commissions and Monday's announcement of a federal Royal Commission into abuse of the young and vulnerable in various institutions. Of course, the most prominent institution likely to be investigated by the Commission is the Catholic Church.
There is a side of me that feels for Cardinal Pell. Ever since he became Archbishop of Melbourne, he has been exercised by dealing with victims of various sorts of abuse at the hands of clergy, not to mention various abortive suggestions that he himself might have been involved. He has attempted to act in ways that attempt to meet the needs of these people to be heard and have their stories acknowledged, and to make some degree of compensation. There can be no doubt that he has acted with sincerity in his own heart.
The problem is that the structures and protocols Pell initiated in Melbourne have fallen far short of vindicating the trust of those who have worked through them. When the Archdiocese submitted a dossier of 600 or so cases of proven sexual assaults by clergy to the Victorian parliamentary committee, the immediate question was whether these were really everything the church had to show, or simply all it was willing to acknowledge. More worrying, there are a number of clergy or religious who have been transferred out of Australia under fortuitous circumstances, leaving a trail of unanswered distress in their wake. Then there's the behaviour of the Melbourne Archdiocese's own Independent Commissioner. As long as any questions persist about the actions of the Commissioner in relation to tipping off clergy about potential police investigations, or of processes conducted in a way that effectively re-traumatises people, it is hard to avoid the feeling of taint about any process under his watch.
Cardinal Pell's press conference from yesterday makes interesting viewing. I admire the fact that he has moved from a position of denying the need for any investigation to cautiously welcoming the establishment of a Royal Commission. This is a big step to take publicly in a matter of days. His particular assertion that sexual abuse has occurred across the spectrum of religious institutions is quite right, but I would question his underlying suggestion that there is some sort of unpleasant sectarianism at play. To the extent that any sectarianism is involved, it is about time the adoption of secret agreements, gagging clauses, in-house investigations and all the things that have hung around the Catholic Church's protocols so far were exposed and tested in a public forum. He is right to have distributed copies of the protocols on sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Sydney at his press conference, but this won't be the end of unease with this document.
The really deep problem is that the Catholic Church has never consistently implemented a protocol for mandatory reporting of any sort of sexual or non-sexual assault. Actually it goes right to the heart of Catholic spiritual discipline. The Irish Church is currently embroiled in a massive argument about the role of the seal of the confessional with these sorts of offenses, and a similar discussion is about to open up here. I think it dubious whether a rapist would really regard their 'conquests' as something to be confessed; what if such a person believes their behaviour is of therapeutic value to the victim, and therefore probably morally neutral rather than sinful? One would hope that any confessor hearing a victim's testimony in the confessional really ought to make absolution conditional on them going straight to the police. To do otherwise is a massive betrayal of what confession is meant to be about: there is no grey area here. Moreover, the Cardinal's own rather curious perspectives about sexual orientation effectively condones the conflation of being gay with being a rapist, as if they are qualitatively the same thing. If you doubt, take a very deep breath and look somewhere like the mad little world of Australia Incognita, where the portmanteau term "homosexual paedophile" is not uncommon, and defended with all the ideological might of the right wing of the American church, where good methodology always defers to strongly-held opinion (which felicitously happens to coincide with the Magisterium). With friends prone to promoting daft self-validating 'research' like this, Pell hardly need fear any enemy.
The take-home message from the Cardinal's press conference might well have been to tell anyone likely to come forward in the future to do the right thing and report to the police before attempting any process of reconciliation with the Church. He could wait a day or two and suggest that it's time the Catholic Bishops talked seriously about taking sexual assault matters out of the hands of their lawyers and instead appointing a referral person for each diocese, whose sole function would be to send complaints directly on to the police without hearing or recording any information. Investigation, justice, and a non-negotiable commitment to integrity must come before reputation management. That would have truth on its side.
There is a side of me that feels for Cardinal Pell. Ever since he became Archbishop of Melbourne, he has been exercised by dealing with victims of various sorts of abuse at the hands of clergy, not to mention various abortive suggestions that he himself might have been involved. He has attempted to act in ways that attempt to meet the needs of these people to be heard and have their stories acknowledged, and to make some degree of compensation. There can be no doubt that he has acted with sincerity in his own heart.
The problem is that the structures and protocols Pell initiated in Melbourne have fallen far short of vindicating the trust of those who have worked through them. When the Archdiocese submitted a dossier of 600 or so cases of proven sexual assaults by clergy to the Victorian parliamentary committee, the immediate question was whether these were really everything the church had to show, or simply all it was willing to acknowledge. More worrying, there are a number of clergy or religious who have been transferred out of Australia under fortuitous circumstances, leaving a trail of unanswered distress in their wake. Then there's the behaviour of the Melbourne Archdiocese's own Independent Commissioner. As long as any questions persist about the actions of the Commissioner in relation to tipping off clergy about potential police investigations, or of processes conducted in a way that effectively re-traumatises people, it is hard to avoid the feeling of taint about any process under his watch.
Cardinal Pell's press conference from yesterday makes interesting viewing. I admire the fact that he has moved from a position of denying the need for any investigation to cautiously welcoming the establishment of a Royal Commission. This is a big step to take publicly in a matter of days. His particular assertion that sexual abuse has occurred across the spectrum of religious institutions is quite right, but I would question his underlying suggestion that there is some sort of unpleasant sectarianism at play. To the extent that any sectarianism is involved, it is about time the adoption of secret agreements, gagging clauses, in-house investigations and all the things that have hung around the Catholic Church's protocols so far were exposed and tested in a public forum. He is right to have distributed copies of the protocols on sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Sydney at his press conference, but this won't be the end of unease with this document.
The really deep problem is that the Catholic Church has never consistently implemented a protocol for mandatory reporting of any sort of sexual or non-sexual assault. Actually it goes right to the heart of Catholic spiritual discipline. The Irish Church is currently embroiled in a massive argument about the role of the seal of the confessional with these sorts of offenses, and a similar discussion is about to open up here. I think it dubious whether a rapist would really regard their 'conquests' as something to be confessed; what if such a person believes their behaviour is of therapeutic value to the victim, and therefore probably morally neutral rather than sinful? One would hope that any confessor hearing a victim's testimony in the confessional really ought to make absolution conditional on them going straight to the police. To do otherwise is a massive betrayal of what confession is meant to be about: there is no grey area here. Moreover, the Cardinal's own rather curious perspectives about sexual orientation effectively condones the conflation of being gay with being a rapist, as if they are qualitatively the same thing. If you doubt, take a very deep breath and look somewhere like the mad little world of Australia Incognita, where the portmanteau term "homosexual paedophile" is not uncommon, and defended with all the ideological might of the right wing of the American church, where good methodology always defers to strongly-held opinion (which felicitously happens to coincide with the Magisterium). With friends prone to promoting daft self-validating 'research' like this, Pell hardly need fear any enemy.
The take-home message from the Cardinal's press conference might well have been to tell anyone likely to come forward in the future to do the right thing and report to the police before attempting any process of reconciliation with the Church. He could wait a day or two and suggest that it's time the Catholic Bishops talked seriously about taking sexual assault matters out of the hands of their lawyers and instead appointing a referral person for each diocese, whose sole function would be to send complaints directly on to the police without hearing or recording any information. Investigation, justice, and a non-negotiable commitment to integrity must come before reputation management. That would have truth on its side.
13 November 2012
Quote of the week
I feel as though I stand at the foot of an infinitely high staircase, down which some exuberant spirit is flinging tennis ball after tennis ball, eternally, and the one thing I want in the world is a tennis ball.
Annie Dillard
09 November 2012
08 November 2012
06 November 2012
More from St Ignatius
Here are a couple of items from the concert at St Ignatius a couple of weeks ago. Click the titles to hear the recordings.
Prelude in G -- Camille Saint-Saens
Prelude and Fugue in c minor -- Felix Mendelssohn (note, it's two files, so two links)
I was playing this recital somewhat handicapped. I was knocked off my my bike while riding to work the previous Monday by a car coming out of a blind driveway. I was riding on a shared path, not on the road. No bones broken, but a lot of tendon strain up my left arm, as I landed on my left hand and all the energy of the fall stopped at the elbow. The bruising has started to go down, and in the next few days I'll be off to a physiotherapist in order to make sure things are healing up the right way.
The main effect of the accident was that I had a lot of pain in the left arm and right leg, although I retained enough mobility in the limbs to still seriously contemplate playing an organ recital just a few days later. Playing trio textures ended up being less stressful work than dealing with the big block chords in the Mendelssohn, although I think the microphone was far enough away that you don't hear me saying 'ouch' through most of the piece.
05 November 2012
Published!
Well, these things tend to travel the long way round. The paper ended up being a chapter of my thesis. I still feel it was one of the stronger chapters; it certainly contributed something that was completely new. The journey from conference paper to thesis chapter to book chapter brings things full-circle. It's very exciting to see it finally out in print, although I've still got a little bit of a wait for my copy to arrive.
The book is now published, so to find out more go and visit the page on the Ashgate website.
01 November 2012
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