Catholic Sensibility

My good friend Tom is leaning on me and the family coming up to Milwaukee this summer for NPM the city's big festival. The latter is far more attractive than the former. Best of all would be the chance to pal around with an all-around great guy. But on NPM, let me say a few things... I first attended an NPM conference in Cincinnati twenty years ago. After an hour in the exhibit room, my eyes were tired from not blinking. The next year, my home town hosted a regional convention. It was so exhausting to the local chapter members that we took the next year off. I have some grand and some gross stories from that event. One night in the hotel bar, a musician sat down at the piano and started doing Ethel Merman imitations on the St Louis Jesuits. Half the bar was in stitches and the other half had no clue as to what the other half was laughing about. Especially when K-Tel offered a free recording of Carol Channing Sings the Best of Carey Landry for the first 500 callers. I was on a subcommittee for jam sessions. Even then, I had a healthy distrust of the commercialization of church music. Our policy was that publishers had their readings sessions, and only conference attendees could reserve jam rooms. I'm sure our bottom line suffered slightly, but there were some mighty fine hours of good music. A few David Haas stories never before published ... David had told our organizers he had a new setting of Morning Praise and Evensong, what was eventually released as the Light and Peace collection. The local committee was waiting on getting his manuscripts; they were under the impression the settings were getting their "debut" at this convention. My friend Gretchen was surprised to sing them the month prior at a music workshop in Buffalo, NY. It could have been a misunderstanding, but we never got the music until the day of the rehearsal with David. The singers were sightreading. Not one complete measure into the first psalm, David stopped and criticized two or three points. Someone spoke up right away and said we hadn't yet seen this music. You mean you're sight reading this? Yes, David. Ohhhh. Well, you're doing a wonderful job! Let's keep going. File away: when I get to be a music director, I'll prepare my choir with music well ahead of time and make sure I don't berate them till I know why they're screwing up ... especially if it's my fault. I asked David if he wanted to sign up for a jam session room. He said definitely not; the conference was already getting enough of his music. But when I left my jam session the first night, I squeezed through a crowd of people at the top of the escalator on the 2nd floor. In the middle of the crowd, at the piano, was the man himself. "Do you want to hear the song I wrote while I was in Hawaii last summer?" "Oh yes, David, please!" I shook my head, finished my squeezing through and went home; it was already fairly late, and some of us musicians had an early morning prayer to work. I appreciate my NPM experience. But I have no need to go back. For one year, I got to plan, work, and play music with some of the best church musicians in my area and a few good ones from around the country. I was recently talking with a KC friend who has been on the NPM Board of Directors, and I found her assessment of NPM, especially its conventions, closely parallel to my own. For Catholic church music, NPM conventions have become a bad thing. The bigger they are or get, the more self-serving they are, and the less service they do for the Church. Virgil Funk has created a monster: a revenue source on which the organization is deeply dependent, driven by the excesses of market capitalism, headlined by "stars" who are admired less for their skill at being musicians than the savvy promotion of a few powers in Catholic music circles. The curia has cardinals. Catholic musicians have their plutocracy. The best thing NPM does is their schools. I've never had a poor experience in them. But they don't make money. Local chapters are good opportunities for musicians to get together and trade ideas, mentor new folks, complain about pastors, etc.. Decision: head out to St Louis' Gateway Liturgical Conference. Cardinal Arinze is speaking and I'm trying to decide what question to ask him during breakout session B1. Duncan Stroik is also speaking and I'm looking forward to perhaps a vigorous conversation in the hotel bar Thursday night. Brittany wants to go to Iowa this summer, and that's what our summer vacation is looking like. Sorry, Tom. Catch you another time.