more scheming

Too busy to record all the craziness of today... just have to note for later that I visited Marc today in Leuven and he's a crazy genius... my first draft of one of the English pages of the Beiaardschool site is up... and taking the opportunity to chat with Jo for an extended period of time proved far more productive than I ever imagined possible. He knows Dr. Boulpaep, he knew Susan Woodson (quite well!!!), and he thinks it's possible to start up a master's degree program in carillon in conjunction with the Antwerpen Conservatorium. Say what?! If I could stay in Belgium another year earning my master's degree from there, perhaps living on a pittance from the Ministry of the Flemish Community, but just as long as I have enough to get by...why, I would sign my firstborn away for the opportunity. Yes, yes, yes, I'm always talking about how I left my heart in San Fran (Berkeley, really) and how I am determined to return... but frankly, it's going to be years before I can return (since living anywhere near my parents even now would drive me insane), and there is no place in the world of all the places I've travelled to that I'd love to stay in more right now than this crazy country in which you never know what's going on or what's possible until you search every corner for it... and then it turns out to be more than you could have ever hoped for. Maybe Jo's idea won't work out and something else will... but I have found everything I needed here, and it was nothing--precisely that, nothing--an empty space in which to build a new life in a different land and to reinvent myself. As I waited for my plane to start boarding in JFK last month, I was realizing that I had become exactly the person I had wanted to be at this stage in my life. Paradoxically, part of being that person is being ready to reinvent myself (without compromising myself). And although I had no clue how much I needed to do that, I know now because I'm doing it...

I'm so inarticulate and overwhelmed with fears and hopes and joy and sheer incredulity at the life I'm living. Sometimes I laugh at myself for being so like an infant here, in awe of everything and overwhelmed by every sight, sound, touch, taste... so innocently carefree and grateful for every moment... but now I wonder if it isn't because in a way I've been reborn.

fulbright statement

I am perfectly aware that this is all crazy talk. But applying for the Fulbright already demonstrates that I'm a loon, doesn't it?

Advanced Carillon Study

“I’ve struggled every night with this etude for hours!” cried Denise, striking a dissonant chord on the practice carillon. “Sometimes I couldn’t see the keys for the tears in my eyes. But I’m not giving up this chance. Help me.” Having taken nine weeks of lessons from and auditioned for the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs as a starry-eyed freshman, I too had fallen in love with the bells and feared I might never play them again after intense basic training. So I met Denise for extra lessons during my weekly recitals, coaching her on the real instrument. For five hours of Guild deliberations, I championed her for her impassioned dedication. But with about sixty candidates competing for six spaces per year, the Guild chose not to admit her. She was waiting for me when I bore the heartbreaking news to her at midnight. And when she asked about joining other carillon programs, I had to answer that carillon schools exist only in Europe.

Leading the largest student carillon program in the country as 2004-2005 co-chair, I decided that I wanted to dedicate my life to music. I relished the responsibilities of a university carillonneur—teaching, pushing a capital renovation project of the tower and carillon through two years of red tape, organizing a two-week concert and master class tour of Europe, and leading planning for the 2006 Congress of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America (GCNA) to be held at Yale. However, these opportunities for leadership and study are not available to students elsewhere. My goal is to put them within reach of aspiring carillonneurs like Denise. By establishing a summer program and ultimately a degree program, I aim to offer basic instruction to part-time and volunteer carillonneurs and advanced study to students without the means or time to study abroad.

But first I must achieve a high level of musicianship, academic research, teaching experience, and development leadership. At the Royal Carillon School “Jef Denyn” (KBJD), I am rapidly improving in performance and campanology research and concurrently earning a joint Master of Music degree in Carillon with a concentration in pedagogy from Missouri State University (MSU), which I plan to complement with a doctorate in organ performance. Yet with teaching programs mostly underdeveloped in the US, I must also rally public support and gain experience in institutional leadership and international collaboration. The Netherlands Carillon Institute (CIN) and National Carillon Museum (NB) are the best places in the world to pursue these goals.

Nearly two hundred carillons have been built in the US, but only one dedicated program has existed since 2004 to train American carillonneurs. Most potential candidates have jobs and families and thus cannot relocate to MSU, and many are excluded by its bachelor of music prerequisite. To address the limited range of learning options, I am organizing a panel on education at the 2006 GCNA Congress and an accompanying pilot coaching program. The GCNA offers only a professional certificate, leaving many carillonneurs feeling excluded and without realistic advancement goals. Coaching sessions with volunteer professionals may attract them to the Congress and active GCNA involvement. I hope to turn this project into an annual event through fundraising efforts for the new Ronald Barnes Memorial Scholarship for domestic carillon study. Likewise, aspiring beginners have few or no learning opportunities because many carillonneurs do not feel qualified or have time to teach. For them, I hope to offer an intensive beginners program in a different region of the country each summer.

Upon graduation from Yale, I could have taught carillon part-time without credentials at a nearby college because teachers are so rare—even I was self-taught until I found the priceless opportunity to study abroad. By contrast, carillon schools in the Low Countries have achieved nearly universal musical proficiency even amongst amateurs. The US needs a degree program enhanced by visiting international teachers to develop North American carillon technique and prepare carillonneurs to teach. All too often, carillons are built without provision to train players and fall into disrepair. As new instruments are built around the US, carillonneurs must be ready to teach local students.

Considering these needs, my plans in the Netherlands are threefold: to study performance at the CIN, to understand promotion, development, and administration as assistant to CIN founder Boudewijn Zwart, and to work in public education as an unpaid intern at the NB. My current teacher is one of the best in Europe, and a year under his demanding instruction should be followed by a year under Zwart’s brilliant guidance at the heaviest carillon in Europe, one similar to North American instruments. While I developed keen networking and publicity skills at Yale, Zwart is the most successful proponent of the construction of new carillons today and can guide me in inspiring public enthusiasm and cutting through the kind of bureaucratic opposition I fought in the restoration of the Yale carillon. Moreover, by ascertaining why the CIN flourishes even as nearby carillon programs flounder, I can avoid repeating our colleagues' mistakes.

I intend to raise my curatorial and public education skills to a professional level at the NB. Having secured funds for and curated bell exhibitions at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments and Yale Library, I am now redesigning the KBJD Carillon Museum and publishing an exhibition catalog, online museum, and much-needed comparative survey of carillon museums with guidelines for improvement. At the NB, I will broaden my skills by leading tours and assisting with exhibits and the maintenance of its vast library so I am prepared to build or expand such a library. And after taking intensive Dutch courses this year, I will improve at the NB in public speaking and academic Dutch, the main language of campanology. These experiences in museology will uniquely prepare me educate the American public and recruit new students.

My personal goals include contributing to communication between the GCNA and Europe (currently I am translating the GCNA website into Dutch and French and the KBJD website into English) and to the unifying goals of the World Carillon Federation (WCF). While international initiatives thrive at the CIN and KBJD, politics and cutthroat rivalry are threatening to dissolve a Dutch carillon school. I hope to assist the WCF in preventing such losses to carillon education. Finally, having written two senior theses in feminist musicology, I intend to investigate why few women hold carillon posts in the Netherlands and promote gender equality in new generations of carillonneurs.

I plan to move to the Netherlands in September for one academic year, after which I will complete my master’s degree and pursue a doctorate in the US while gaining teaching experience. It is my hope that a career in carillon and organ education will eventually enable me to build an accessible undergraduate or graduate carillon degree program in collaboration with both American and European institutions.

The Yale Guild offered me the chance of a lifetime, but I was one of the lucky few. Through the GCNA and my career, I will seek to promote young carillonneurs and help them make the kinds of contributions to the carillon world that inspired me to devote myself to teaching. While Denise pursues her second and last chance to audition for the Guild, I am pursuing the Fulbright Grant to make the instrument accessible to musicians who, like her, possess the fire and dedication to advance the carillon in North America.

good things keep coming my way

Besides the fact that this post was lost after half an hour of typing, good things really do keep coming my way. The Brabant Gothic church of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw over de Dijle stands two blocks away from my house in grey, grimy under-renovation glory. This morning I met Wannes Vanderhoeven, who replaced Geert as choir(!) and harmony teacher at the Beiaardschool while the latter was at UC Berkeley, to work out my practice schedule on the organ. Wannes was surprisingly young, sociable, fluent in English, and astonishingly helpful. I'm free to practice during the church's opening hours whenever he and his students aren't there, and he offered to personally let me in outside of opening hours and to try to get me access to the new organ that will soon be arriving at the Mechelen Conservatorium. Like hello, can I do something for you in return...make your coffee every day, I dunno??? American churches often require us starving students to pay for our practice time, even when we know the organists...and I'm getting to practice this glorious centuries-old instrument even though I have nothing to do with the church, or Belgium, or anything really.

I thought that everything went my way at Yale with hard work because the university was designed for smart, motivated kids to make things happen (not to mention because it's funded by $40,000 per year per student). But now I show up in a foreign country, having left my pride behind and steeled myself against endless bureacracy, and doors just keep falling open. Oh, you want to study with a carillonneur who's too badass too bother teaching anymore? No problemo. Wanna record your carillon playing? Get recorded on the heaviest carillon in Europe, and the audio engineer will send you the mastered recording ASAP. You also wanna study with one of the most well-known organists in the country, and you've played a shit audition? You're in! So you have the keys for several organs in Antwerpen, but you'd rather not commute? You can practice in your glorious neighborhood cathedral, which just happens to house a couple of Peter Paul Rubens paintings, several times per week. Even: Oh, you want to miss two months of rent having not even paid your deposit in full? No worries; your landlords wave off your apologies before you can even start them. Luck follows me around, or I manufacture it in constant supply.

So I arrived at 11u00 intending to practice two hours, and left at 15u30 not remembering that I hadn't eaten lunch to barely make it to a Vlaams Radio Koor concert of vocal music by Poulenc and Milhaud. I didn't even know they had composed vocal music; in fact, I've never heard works by either performed live before. And now this wonderful choir shows up in my little town with an hour's worth of the stuff. The Bordleys were there, and they suggested some Dames,...Naakt En Gekleed destinations, which I visited before biking south along the canals to Zemst. My discoveries included the mysterious Planckendael Dierenpark and the way into the back parking lot of the train station! Never will I be without a space again. Biking home to the strains of Moby's "Love Should," I got teary-eyed in the twilight.

I didn't get much done that I was "supposed" to do, but even a day like this feels incredibly productive, just because so many incredible things happen.

de grootste beiaard in europa

hangs in the Grote Kerk of Dordrecht, the Netherlands. And playing it is eerily like getting high--rather like the Dutch fellow who passed Richard and me in his car smoking a joint, only better and more addictive. By 13u00 I was utterly drunk on the sound of those bells. I can't quite call Dordrecht 'carillon heaven' anymore, because the church and city looked more beautiful at night in March than they did on this overcast October day. But it's still damn close. In December, Boudewijn will have a carillon installed in the tower of the city hall a few blocks away that can be enclosed and played all day at will. Count his travelling carillon, and you probably get more carillons per square kilometer than any other place in the world. Not only that, but without telling me in advance, he had a recording technician do the setup, recording, and mastering for me. Did someone say bad ass? I really, really hope I find a way to study in Dordrecht next year.

My old gripe about Holland remains true... it's too much like the US. But now that I'm living in a country quite different from my homeland, it's nice to be able to hop across the border and feel as if I'm in America. Rotterdam even has frozen coffee. And Chinese takeout. I had to exercise mad chopstick skillz on my dish, because Europeans don't automatically give you plastic silverware (weird word) or chopsticks. And surreptitiously swiped wooden coffee stirrers are surprisingly floppy when you start trying to pick up vegetables with them.

It was surprisingly heart-warming to revisit the places we'd seen during EuroTour 2005. Ironically, those vaguely familiar sights made me feel at home. My standards of familiarity have clearly plummeted (also in terms of social familiarity). I think this could be a good change.

chanson du jour

The bike ride to Willebroek today confirmed it. I am transformed. Free of him. This is a day I never thought I would see. Particularly not this soon... I was prepared to grieve for a decade or two before my memory of him would grow too dim for me to know what I had seen in him. Now I can regret him--without believing that my life will never be what it was meant to be without him. Thank you, Atlantic Ocean. Thank you, BAEF. Thank you, Giant. Thank you, fate. Oh, fuck you too, fate. If you play any more games with my mind like you did this August, I'll have none of it. Absolutely none of it.

So my selection today is Radiohead's Lurgee. A crytic, simple statement of the facts. I was never particularly straightforward anyway. Ignore the title.

And also, because it's effective for everything, I now cite Hart Crane's final poem, The Broken Tower (1932). Sometime I'll post my essay on it. You know I'd find a way to write my final essay for Harold Bloom on carillons.

Image No. 2 is now memorized, albeit shakily. Practicing tonight, I had insights into problems I've had with 'Reflection' and 'Preludio V' since they entered my repertoire. It's hard to believe that I never thought of these solutions before... also hard to believe that I'd finally come up with them at 2 am while totally sleep deprived and antsy. Thank you, Belgium. And in a couple more hours, hello Holland.

stunning memories

Yesterday evening, a conversation with Geert on a drive to Antwerpen that ended all too soon reminded me to dig up the fictionalized account I wrote during my junior year of a couple of EuroTour 2003 mishaps, of which there were many. Each time I bike past Sint-Romboutstoren and find my breath stolen by the sight of it rising through the midnight mist, I am reminded of this excerpt:

14:32. The minivan screeched to a halt by the statue anchoring a cobblestone roundabout and Serena leaped out, struggling to extract her camera from her backpack as George asked why she had demanded that he stop in the middle of the road. She simply pointed her lens at the Brabantine Gothic belfry and began to shoot madly.

From amidst the two- to three-story Rococo buildings of Mechelen's Grote Markt rose the magnificent white stone mass of St.-Romboutstoren for over thirty meters--a hundred feet. The monolith gleamed in the warmth of the afternoon sun, layer upon layer of heavy stone articulated by elaborate stringcourses. Powerful piers pushed their way into the sky, dissolving into elaborate Gothic carving in the upper third of the tower in answer to the piers that branched into glazed clerestories in the cathedral. Forty-nine carillon bells hung within the upper third of the tower.

“She’s having a towergasm!” quipped Tanya as Serena marveled at Sint-Romboutstoren, stern, immovable, and timeless as a mountain. With nothing else tall on the horizon, the tower seemed to soar to impossible heights.

The bourdon, the heaviest bell of the carillon, began to toll the half-hour like a summons to perform. She hurried into the minivan, and the group took off at full speed for one of the most glorious instruments they would ever play.

eep!

high-strung and exhausted and intense as ever.

bike prankstering

SUV Drivers in Paris Get Wind Knocked Out of Them: A clandestine group lets air out of tires as a form of protest. The vehicles' owners are not amused.

A sign that there is hope in the world. A shame SoCal has to sully our state's tree-hugging name. Then again, even my landlord has a giant American car. As Koen explained, Europeans get them to protect themselves in accidents too. Although considering how infuriatingly obedient pedestrians are of traffic signals, I can't imagine the drivers are half as hostile as they are considered here. Nobody holds a candle to Boston and New York.

my bike changed my life

Yesterday I went on an elating bike ride and made incredible discoveries to be elaborated upon later. Today I took off again because I desperately needed a break from typing at my computer all day. The ensuing 16-kilometer bike tour changed my life.

I moved to Belgium thoroughly warned by various people and sources to expect depression and a difficult and lonely transition, and even to be quite dissatisfied with Mechelen. The past few weeks haven't been easy. But I've spent the past year broken-hearted and (spiritually) dead, wondering if I would ever find the will to live again, or in fact a compelling reason to live. Coming alone to a different continent with only a few heavy suitcases and a gossamer-thin support network, I didn't expect my situation to help. And yet I am beginning to suspect that living in Belgium is finally healing my shattered heart and broken spirit. I feel alive again. Completely and utterly alive.

On the way back from Battel (the very outskirts of Mechelen and filled with wonders I'll just have to describe later), I experienced a small revelation, took another step on the path towards understanding myself and the man I still foolishly and fundamentally love. Part of what made me feel alive and elated when I was in Berkeley and/or with him was constant discovery, even of feelings I never knew existed. And it's constant discovery that has brought me to love Yale, New Haven, urban spelunking, and other unrelated and often unlikely places and activities. Now I'm in an environment where daily revelations are unavoidable for me. They're waiting for me outside my front door as well as at the end of 90-minute unintentionally profound twilight bike rides.

So discovery is part of what drives me. Perhaps it's even a fundamental need...a reason for living. Who have I been in love with? JR or the experience of discovering life with him? Having spent the past few days in intense reflection, I still don't know if this driving force is something I can or should try to explain as I struggle to define myself in my latest application essay. But it's far more important that I now understand it myself. Because discovery has always been important to me, and the need for it was essential to finding a way here. But who would have known it would be the one thing in the world that would finally make me rise from the ashes of this yearlong darkness?

the sky is falling down

How many natural disasters can happen within the space of a few months?


It's seemed senseless to donate money to causes when it has already been, in a sense, donated to support my cause. But I've been doing essay orders now, so counting that as my own income, I managed (after much searching) to find a trustworthy charity to donate it to: Islamic Relief. Be forewarned, it may be strange to receive the receipt and thank you message partially in Arabic. But do consider supporting the survivors who must live on after 20,000 others have died... a number beyond human comprehension.

It was surreally difficult to track down any English-speaking charity actively soliciting donations for earthquake efforts on its website. None of the news reports had links for potential donors, and visits to the Red Cross, Oxfam, and other major websites didn't turn up a single mention of the quakes. Have organizations not been updating their websites on the weekend, or have I stumbled across some cultural charity rift? It was easy enough to donate even to Indonesian tsunamai relief efforts.

The difficulty of finding information on Google made me realize that finding breaking news and information on search engines is unfortunately not particularly effective. I wonder how long it will take before crawlers pick up on this particular relief effort.