Musical Journal Entries

This summer I'm meeting with novelist Dean Bakopoulos and artist Lee Running to plan our collaborative course to be taught in the spring.  We're putting composers, writers, and artists together to do creative projects.  The course will culminate in the visit of the innovative,  Pulitzer Prize-winning ensemble, "Roomful of Teeth," who will be presenting a concert consisting exclusively of works written by participants in the collaborative course.

As preparation for our course, we've been engaging in collaborative projects ourselves this summer.  Here are a few works-in-progress.  I wrote these short piano pieces to some verses that Dean Bakopoulos wrote.  This is just a sort of demo/progress report, not ready for prime time.  It's meant to give an idea of the collaborative creative process that we're pursuing.  I recorded them at home just a few minutes after I wrote them.

Listen to "Insomniac" John Rommereim, piano

New lovers: One insomniac at a kitchen sink;

staring out at the shadows and streetlamps.

Upstairs, the one sleeping knows nothing of it.

Oh she sleeps and she sleeps and she sleeps.
                Dean Bakopoulos

Listen to "Heavy Crows on Soundcloud (John Rommereim, piano)

All still, then not still, the dusk shimmers

a million exhausted leaves, shaking with heavy crows.

After midnight one bird awakened,

outside, he tweets: I believe I believe I believe.

                       Dean Bakopoulos

Listen to "mouth Harp" John Rommereim, piano

Here's another piece from this set of miniatures. In this piece, I was trying to get the piano to produce different vowel sounds.  I use my fingernail on the string to create an effect that is something like a jaw harp. If you listen carefully, I hope that you can sometimes hear these diferent sounds in the bass repeated notes (sort of "ee-aw-ee-aw").  You could also think of it as sort of overtone singing for the piano. I recorded this one at home like the others, just a few minutes after making it up.

Here's a piece to go with this poem by Dean Bakopoulos:

You never miss the things you think you’ll miss

you never need the things you think you’ll need

what you miss is the quiet years spent dreaming,

all the dreams, all the dreams, all the dreams.

Listen to The Things You Think You'll Miss on Soundcloud

 Here's another one to go with this poem:

One fragment dances down the hallway in silence,

another fragment lodges in your inner ear.

Here’s a trumpet, of salvation, and it’s blowing,

all the years, all the years, all the years.

Listen to All The Years on Soundcloud

You can play the set of pieces on Soundloud (click on "Collaborative Piano Miniatures").

Dear Russophiles,
Check out this music by the early twentieth-century Grinnell music professor Edward Scheve recorded last December:
"Logos" Choir

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UULClCosk8Q

Why is this choir in Moscow singing music by a Grinnell professor in Russian?  It’s a long story. Through some strange quirks of fate, the music of Edward Scheve (1865-1924) (Едвард Шеве) became popular in Russia among members of the Baptist church (евангельскиe христиан-баптисты) – and it remains popular today.  How is it that this passionate devotion to Scheve’s music was sustained through all those decades of the Soviet Union and afterward?  Edward Scheve taught at Grinnell from 1906 until his death in 1924.  He was born into a family of Baptist missionaries in Germany, and came to the US in 1890.  He received musical training at the Berlin Academy of Music. 

A page from Scheve's Symphony in D Minor
(from Grinnell College Archives)

While at Grinnell, in 1908, he published the Oratorio, Der Tod und Auferstehung der Christi, an evening-long work for large orchestra, choir, and soloists, with text in German and English.  The choral score was published jointly by a German publisher and by Grinnell College. He wrote several large-scale oratorios, including, intriguingly, a Requiem in honor of Grinnell’s Civil War dead – those who are listed on the plaque in the back of Herrick Chapel.  I am trying to track down that score, but I have yet to find it.  He also wrote a symphony, a piano concerto, quite a bit of organ music, and various pieces of chamber music.  The orchestral score of Der Tod und Auferstehung exists only in the Grinnell archive. 

Last year, I received an email inquiry from a musician in Moscow, Oleg Romanenko, and I sent him a pdf of Scheve’s manuscript.  He went to work and spent many, many hours creating the typeset score in the Finale notation program.  In April of last year, they performed the orchestral version of half of the work in Moscow using these materials – the modern premiere. In a couple of days, at this year’s Grinnell alumni reunion, we are performing two excerpts of the oratorio (on Sunday, June 2) in a version that I’ve made for string quartet and organ.  

The story gets stranger.  I could tell you, for instance, about the unexpected Baptist Russian émigré Scheve-ophiles who popped up out of nowhere, having driven to Grinnell from California, and devoted an entire week to photographing Scheve’s scores in the library.  For Russian readers, check out the “musical-literary” concert that was organized very recently around Scheve’s oratorio by combining it with material from the 1951 Swedish Nobel Laureate Per Lagerquist’s novel Barrabus: 

http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=press&type=list&press_id=688

The organizers of that event, titled «Варавва–отпущенник», combined Scheve’s oratorio, which tells the story of Jesus’s passion, with spoken material from Lagerquist’s novel, which deals with the same subject matter, but takes the perspective of the criminal Barrabus.  By the way, there’s material galore here for anyone who’s interested in pursuing this story as a MAP.  One interesting angle to my mind is the fascination shown in this «Варавва-отпущенник» project with the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate – a theme that figures so prominently in Bulgakov.

John Rommereim