Jan 1

I'm writing this from the midst of music.  It's the newest, most tender part of 2016, those first few days in which you struggle to remember what the heck date it is.  I struggle to remember a lot more than the date these days, which could be an early sign of impending Alzheimer's, or a manifestation of insomnia, or no more or less than the general, inexorable overfilling of my brain with the murky stuff of memory.

This is the root of the impulse to record: knowing that, if I do not, these pine boughs and silver pipes, this fatigue and the vague feeling that I have overeaten, will slip away, tucked into the great black bag of the past and stollen away. 

So here I am.  It's 2015.  I'm sitting in a pew, still uncomfortable despite its velvet cusion.  The air smells of pine and sweat and that indefnitable funk of church.  Ten feet front of me, my colleagues are rehearsing music composed four hundred years ago, give or take.  Some of them forgot their pencils.  Some of them are playing their hearts out.  Some of them of already thinking about lunch.  Some of the shapes they make are exactly right and some are twisted shadows of what could have been; and this is the way with music; and this is the way with most of what precedes it and most of what follows after.

We listen to what's here.  Maybe scribble it down if we can.  Play sometimes.  Sit back down.