They say -- and I believe them -- that if you ask a bunch of kindergarteners, “Raise your hand if you can draw,” every hand will go up.

Ask the same of a bunch of eighth graders; one or two hands will rise.

We all start out with abundant creative energy. Most lose it.

Why? What happens?

I never lost mine but I remember, clearly and painfully, when my friends did. Until we were ten or eleven, we would play with toy soldiers together, setting up military miniatures on the floors of our bedrooms and inventing situations for them -- skirmishes, raids, rescues, battles -- making up the plot as we went along, bestowing distinct personalities upon the tiny figures.

Suddenly, at eleven years of age, my friends only wanted to play baseball. I couldn’t see the fun in playing a game with rules already invented. If someone had said, “Here’s a ball and a bat; invent a game,” THAT would have been fun. But a proscribed game? Why three bases? Why three strikes? Who sez?

Too, my friends suddenly evinced a passionate desire to WIN. Win what? If ‘our team’ won, what exactly would we win? What would we have after winning that we didn’t have before?

When we played with toy soldiers, there were victories and defeats We even set up elaborate dioramas of Lee surrendering to Grant, Cornwallis surrendering to Washington. But the question of who won was beside the point. We never cared who won. The fun was in the plots we invented.

After baseball took over our neighborhood, and basketball and football soon after, I played at the games but I never liked them. At home, I played alone with my toy soldiers. I hoped new families would move to our street with kids who would “get” toy soldiers. None did.

In the 7th grade I became passionate about writing stories and music. ‘Collecting toy soldiers’ was relegated to the status of a hobby. It’s been a hobby ever since. Far less interesting and important to me than writing and composing, though I still love my ‘military minatures.’ I have about two thousand of them and a couple hundred of the prettiest ones are on display in my second-floor ‘cubbyhole.’

I still love dioramas and toy soldiers. I bought two dozen Viking figures on line a few months ago and I’ve enjoyed painting their blond braids, beards, eyebrows and mustaches. They come to life when they are painted.

The question to ponder is: why did I retain my creative energy while most of my friends did not?

Partly because I had good parenting. But surely most of those Eighth-graders who don’t raise their hands when asked if they can draw also had good parenting. It has to be more than that.

Perhaps it’s a growing capacity for self-criticism. Eighth-graders unconsciously add the word “well” to the request. They hear: “Raise your hand if you can draw WELL.”

But that was not what was asked. Drawing, after all, is just pressing the tip of a pencil down as you move it around on a piece of paper. The blind can do that.

Perhaps it has to do with an increased awareness that our peers are watching and judging us.

Perhaps it’s because we become aware that others seem more talented that we. A child notices that others’ drawings are more accurate, more representational. The child concludes, “They have talent; I do not.” The child stops drawing and never tries again. This is sad.

Perhaps someone in authority told them they couldn’t draw. My friend Chris Miller told me about an 80-year-old man who joined a church choir, singing for the first time in 75 years. He had a fine voice. The choir director asked him why he had not sung for three quarters of a century. “When I was in kindergarten our teacher tested our voices and divided us into nightingales and crows, her names for the kids who could sing and the kids who couldn’t. She said I was a crow.

Perhaps as some talents flourish (such as a talent for ball games), other talents are lost. I remember a composer telling me that he “couldn’t draw a straight line.” I asked him, “What fun is there in drawing a straight line?”

A painter told me he wished he could play the piano. “Just push down on the keys,” I said.

Many say they wish they could write. What is stopping them?

I do not know why my creative energy never waned. For me, from the git-go, ‘making up stuff’ was fun. It has never stopped being fun. I can only shrug and give thanks.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

October is upon us. Here is a poem by Odell Shepard which I set to music:

October

A Spirit dances down the world
On swift and shining sandals
Who makes the woods rejoice and spills
A splendor of flame upon the hills
And lights the sumac candles.

Her clear voice calls my very name --
Calls, and will have an answer;
And all my heart is bound away
Into the colored hills to stray
After that hidden dancer.

Farewell to friend and wife and child
And all things wise or sober!
For I have drunk deep of vivid stains
And feel like magic in my veins
The wild wine of October.

To hear the Grinnell College Choir, directed by James Fudge, singing October from “Three Songs from The Harvest of a Quiet Eye,” click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

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Not long ago, one of you wrote to thank me for writing my “Three Songs from the Harvest of a Quiet Eye,” which he had sung when it was performed at Grinnell College in Iowa. He mentioned that he had kept and still cherished a cassette tape recording of my work. I asked him to transcribe it into an mp3 and thus I now have the only recording that has been made of the songs.

As you would expect, the technical quality is not great. But the performance is wonderfully expressive and heartfelt. Sometimes, when the technical quality of a recording is less than satisfactory, we must try to hear past and through the challenges thus presented in order to perceive the music itself. I must ask you for this forbearance today.

This suite, “Three Songs from the Harvest of a Quiet Eye” is also available both as a work for baritone & piano.

Today I am eager to share with you the first of the three songs, a lovely poem:

The Elm Tree is a Lady by Odell Shepard

The Mountain pine is a man at arms
With flashing shield and blade,
The willow is a dowager,
The birch is a guileless maid,
But the elm tree is a lady
In gold and green brocade.

Broad-bosomed to the meadow breeze
The matron maple grows,
The poplar plays the courtesan
To every wind that blows,
But who the tall elm’s lovers are
Only the midnight knows.

And few would ever ask it
Of such a stately tree,
So lofty in the moonlight,
So virginal stands she,
Snaring the little silver fish
That swim in her silent sea.

But hush! A hum of instruments
Deep in the night begins;
Along those dusky galleries
Low music throbs and thins --
A whispering of harps and flutes
And ghostly violins.

For what mysterious visitor
Do all her windy bells
Ring welcome in the moonlight
And amorous farewells?
The elm tree is a lady.
The midnight never tells.

What does this mean? -- “Snaring the little silver fish that swim in her silent sea.” ?

The poet is looking up through the branches of a tree at night and seeing the stars “like little silver fish” beyond, in the “silent sea” of the sky. Trying to that vision musically was an inspiring challenge.

If you know the term “tone painting,” -- and you probably do -- please excuse me if I share its definition: “musical description, by harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic means, of the words of a text.” Finding ways to depict what the words of a song describe is one of the delights of composing vocal music.

Sometimes it is obvious: you can hear the “matron maple” growing and swelling when the piano plays a rising string of notes at that point.

Odell Shepard was a pianist and an organist and he possessed a fine baritone voice. He gives his musicality a gusty expression in this verse:

A hum of instruments
Deep in the night begins;
Along those dusky galleries
Low music throbs and thins --
A whispering of harps and flutes
And ghostly violins.

It’s as if he is deliberately offering a composer opportunities for tone painting. I took the bait!

For the “hum of instruments,” listen for that ‘open fifths’ sound which violins, violas and cellos make as they are tuning.

Listen for the “whispering of harps” in the piano’s arpeggiated chords accompanying the solo melody in what would be the lowest register of a flute.

When the chorus sings “ghostly violins,” listen for the descending line in the piano’s right hand, as if the tune was being played on a ghostly solo violin.

When “all her bells ring welcome in the moonlight” listen for the mysterious clanging chords as the chorus sings “amorous farewells.”

The piano, standing in for the elm tree, is given the last word, repeating at the end of the song the music it played at the beginning. It’s like seeing a tree from a distance, drawing closer to it, passing some time in its shadow and then withdrawing to a distance again, ending the encounter.

Ah, choral music! There is nothing else quite like it.

To hear the Grinnell College Choir under the direction of James Fudge performing “The Elm Tree is a Lady,” click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Our daughter, Shenandoah, emailed me a birthday greeting (today is my 72nd birthday), which included this observation:

“I am really enjoying ‘The Blue Rock!’ It’s giving me insight into you—specifically that you are, for the most part, oriented toward the past.”

I replied:

You’re right, yes, I am oriented toward the past.

I came of age during the centennial of the Civil War and my brother and I made a point of knowing all about every major battle when its anniversary arrived, ‘playing out’ these battles with toy soldiers on our bedroom floor.

I love documentaries about ancient Greece and before, the further back the better. I was thrilled to see a documentary not long ago about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations, about which I had known nothing. Cave paintings? love ‘em.

I was probably more excited about visiting Mesa Verde on our family trip there a few years ago than I was at any of the many other national parks we’ve seen. I recently discovered the extraordinary pottery of the Mogollon culture that lived in Arizona’s Mimbres Valley exactly one thousand years ago. On-line, I’ve looked at photos of hundreds of Mogollon bowls.

Your mother and I have always nested in old houses and this present home of ours, probably our last, is the oldest yet, built in 1830.

I like to know the ‘back stories,’ accounts of where things come from, how they got to be the way they are. I’m fascinated by the etymologies of words, which often go way back.

I love France, French history and the French language, the oldest living European language to have been written down. You’ll recall I volunteered for two weeks, restoring a 9th-century castle near Avignon.

I like traditions, especially food traditions from my family, like poppyseed strudel and oyster dressing. Being very traditional, I think the Father should sit at the head of the table. I realize that’s a bit sexist, but there it is.

I adore historic inns and national park lodges. I love poking around historic districts and old churches.

My music was new when it was written but almost all of it extends musical traditions that pre-date me. As a composer, I’m no innovator. I like early jazz much better than later. I played the piano, professionally, for feature length silent films of the 1920’s, hundreds of times. Shostakovich did this too and said it was a great training exercise for a composer; the film accompanist is forced to invent music for all sorts of scenarios.

Charles Ives is one of my heroes, a curious figure. Janus-like, he evoked the world of his childhood by quoting Civil War tunes and old American hymns, using modernistic dissonances anticipating the avant garde that was to come. Above all, he was a regionalist, as rooted in Connecticut as I am in Ohio, where I’ve lived my whole life.

I’m distrustful of what is new. I really really don’t want to get a cell phone though I am going to have to, one of these days, caving in at long last to a tireless campaign from your mother, my better four-fifths. (She’s had a cell phone of her own for years.)

Though I am ardent about democratic self-government and thus, majority rule, I’m suspicious when majority rule is appied to pop culture. If “everybody” loves it, whatever it is, I turn contrarian and assume it can’t be much good. I’ve always been that way. When I was 14 (already a little old man) and “everybody” my age was swooning over the Beatles, I sniffed.

Over the past 18 years “everybody” has signed up for Facebook ... except me. Perhaps I’m missing out. “Often wrong, but never in doubt!” C’est moi.

I love art museums but pass quickly through the galleries displaying contemporary art, almost all of which almost always seems absurd to me.

I attend church every Sunday and a ‘zoom’ Bible Study every Tuesday during which we ponder passages from a certain old book. The teachings of Jesus are as radical as the sunrise but, again, 2000 years old.

My new book The Blue Rock is old fashioned, an extension of the American Tall Tale tradition. And the Blue Rock itself is immemorial, probably almost as old as our planet, which is itself a vast and ancient “blue rock” swimming in space.

Here’s a little poem I wrote a few years ago:

I’m an old-fashioned man
with an old-fashioned life.
I’ve an old-fashioned house
and an old-fashioned wife.

I like old-fashioned food
and old-fashioned books,
old-fashioned whiskers
and old-fashioned looks.

I’ll keep living this way,
as an old-fashioned man,
with my house, wife and books
for as long as I can.

And then I’ll move on
in the old-fashioned way,
serene and content
to let come what may.

If I hadn’t told you that I wrote that poem a few years ago, when would you have guessed it was written? Anytime in the last two hundred and fifty years, wouldn’t you say? Its form and content are very ‘old-fashioned.’ Yet there’s nothing to prevent it from having been written last week.

The same goes for my music. If you heard my music on the radio and didn’t know who had written it, when would you guess it was penned? Most of my music could have been written anytime in the past hundred and twenty five years and I’m proud of that because it suggests that the music achieves a certain degree of timelessness.

These days, with most of my creative career behind me, I continue to work, part-time, as a teacher, one of the oldest and noblest professions.

I’m proud to think that I am continuing wholesome traditions in various ways, looking to the past for precedence, wisdom and inspiration.

The Future doesn’t need me. It will do as it pleases. I won’t be around for much of it, in any case. I don’t think about Posterity. As some wag has said, “What’s Posterity ever done for me?"

Loving you and your brother and your mother as I do is also very old fashioned.

love, Papa

- - - - -

On this, my birthday, I want to share one of my favorite choral works, an old fashioned setting of Odell Shepard’s lovely old fashioned poem, “The Town Beyond the Mountain.”

The only recording I have of this work is beautifully sung but the technical quality is poor. Bear with it, please. To hear the Grinnell College Choir perform it under the direction of James Fudge, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.