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SUMMER 2009

Officers 2009-2010

Dean: Roseann Penner Kaufman
Sub-Dean: Ken Walker
Secretary: Carol Wallace
Treasurer: Lynn Bratney
Registrar: Pamela Robison
Class of 2012: Tom Atkin, Michael Phelps, Deborah Winter
Auditors: Dale Ramsey, Joan Schmitt

BOMBARDE! Report

This issue of BOMBARDE! is available only in electronic form. If you know of members who would be interested in any of the information enclosed, please print a copy and share it with them. The primary focus of this BOMBARDE! is [1] placement listings [2] recitals, and [3] the important updates and invitations to our very exciting PIPE ORGAN ENCOUNTER. Finally, there is a piece included that I (Sharon Hettinger) read to the Executive Board at our final meeting in May, that you might be interested in reading and/or sharing regarding the importance of music:

Welcome address to freshman at Boston Conservatory
Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at Boston Conservatory.

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not
properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good
grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as
a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than
I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced
my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores."
On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of
music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to
classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function.
So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts
music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious
music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing
whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment.
Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient
Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and
astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of
relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was
seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects.
Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts
and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me
give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for
the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen
was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was
captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a
place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a
violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific
players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners
and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in
the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why
would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music?
There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a
beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the
obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps
were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is
part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one
of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached
a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at
the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by
force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard,
and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the
keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely
irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city
yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place
has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of
getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I
contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then
I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We
didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most
certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in
New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire
houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the
Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms
Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The
first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that
historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life
might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the
arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part
of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's
not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a
plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human
survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways
in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand
things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart-wrenchingly beautiful piece
Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know
it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a
film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry
over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious
reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist
does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no
music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some
really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very
predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of
emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the
people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music
starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible
pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we
feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or
Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the
audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal
objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of
my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in
my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like
playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to
please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were
important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most
important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND,
about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began,
as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during World War
II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down
during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going
to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case,
because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece
later in the program and to just come out and play the music without
explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the
front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly
a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and
general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I
thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that
particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've
heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the
piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk
about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in
which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot.
The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave
the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did
come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in
an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my
friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which
had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into
the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many
years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to
me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why
this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this
piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more
than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings
and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between
internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have
ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow,
with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help
him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class
when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your
sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing
appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine
that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM
someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is
confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out
whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell
yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't
about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer;
I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to
become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a
chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if
they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves
and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I
expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this
planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of
equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military
force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of
the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have
peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an
understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I
expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the
concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might
be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

PIPE ORGAN ENCOUNTER EVENTS

Please Come and Support the PIPE ORGAN ENCOUNTER by Attending These Events:

Sunday, 21 June, 7:30 p.m.
Chelsea Chen, organist
Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral, KCMO

Monday, 22 June, 7:30 p.m. ($5 admission fee)
Carrol McLaughlin, harp John Schaefer, organ
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, KCMO.
This is a combination recital and performance anxiety workshop.

Tuesday, 23 June, 7:30 p.m.
POE Faculty Recital
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, KCMO.

Wednesday, 24 June, 7:30 p.m.
Young Artists’ Recital
Gano Chapel, William Jewell College, Liberty, MO.

Friday, 26 June, 4 p.m.
POE Campers’ Recital
Central United Methodist Church, KCMO.

BILL TIMMEAUS’ ADDRESS – Available online

BILL TIMMAEUS’s address from our May meeting is posted HERE, where you may read it or download it. If you have any difficulty downloading it, please contact me at slhett@sunflower.com, and I will send you a copy (via email). ~Sharon Hettinger

UPCOMING RECITALS OF NOTE

Saturday, 30 May 2009, 12 noon.
Debut concert of Simon Carrington Chamber Singers; tickets available by calling 816.214.9928. Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral. 13th and Broadway, Kansas City, MO.

Sunday, 31 May 2009, 4 p.m.
The Westminster Concert Bell Choir, from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, NJ, in concert. Kathy Ebling-Thorne, director. St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Wornall & Meyer Blvd., Kansas City, MO. The world-renowned handbell choir is presented by St. Andrew’s and Grace United Methodist Church, Olathe. Free-will offering. Come early for a good seat.

Sunday, 14 June 2009, 2 p.m.
Dr. David Lamb, organist, Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral, KCMO. Director of Music & Organist in Columbus, IN, at First United Methodist Church, he will open the recital with Guilmant’s Marche Religieuse, and play works by Marcello, Stanley, Hollins, Saint-Saens, Bach, and Mendelssohn. The second half features works by Denis Bedard–the most interesting title is The Cat Suite (Prrelude, Cats at Play, Catnap, and Toc-cat-a)–and the recital concludes with Guilman’ts Final from the First Organ Sonata.

SUMMER PLACEMENT INFORMATION

Director of Music/Organist
Westport Presbyterian Church, 201 Westport Rd., Kansas City, MO 64111. 1S, 1R, P (Reuter/Wicks, 3M, 23R), $N. Effective 7/1/2009. Application deadline 6/30/2009. Contact Rev. Scott Myers at (816) 931-1032 or revmyers@westportpresbyterian.org. Church website is www.westportpresbyterian.org.

Grace Episcopal Church, 520 S. 291 Hwy., Liberty, MO, 64068. 1S, 1R, $N, Rodgers Hybrid, Digital/Pipe. Position open 6/1/2009. Contact Rev. Susan G. McCann, Rector at church address, mothermccann@prodigy.net, or (cell) 816.718.2356.

Organist
Northminster Presbyterian Church, 1441 NE Englewood Rd., Kansas City, MO, 64118. 1S, 1R. Contact Rev. Seth Wheeler at seth@northminsterkc.org or 816.453.2545 (church) or 816.808.7052 (cell).

Organist/Pianist
Leawood Baptist Church, 8200 State Line Road, Leawood, KS 66206, is seeking a part-time person to play organ and piano each Sunday morning, accompany choir rehearsals Wednesday or Thursday evenings, be available for periodic vocal and instrumental rehearsals. Must be comfortable with traditional and contemporary styles of worship. Salary: $175/week. Contact Michelle Egbert, Director of Worship, Music & Young Adult Ministries. Phone 913.649.0100 or email: music@leawoodbaptist.com.

SUBSTITUTES AVAILABLE FOR YOU

Names in red are those who notified the Bombarde editor
of their availability to substitute this summer.

	Betty Bauer – org, lit	913.814.9021 or 913.488.8417
	Phyllis Curtis, MM – org	(4th & 5th Sundays only) 913.839.8856, 913.406.5327 or 913.248.6600
	Doris Daniels – org, lit	816-431-3244, 816-721-3191 or 913.288.7129
	Sharon Davies, BM – org	816.331.5581
	Kathy Hellwege, BSE – org, dir, lit, sop, alto	913.362.0594 or 913.706.0126
	David Jarnonowski - org, dir, lit	216.534.4876 (h) 816.323.2380 (w)
	Steven McDonald – org, dir, lit	785.841.4696 or 785.242.5200x5439
	Nick Mourlam, SPC – org, lit	913.488.1272
	Caroline M. Neal, M.A. - org, pian	(Saturdays only) 816.305.9526
	Michael Phelps – org, lit, dir	816.876.5677
	John Pitchford, MM, SPC – org	913.663.3768
	Freda Proctor - org, dir, lit	913.328.0721 (h); 913.484.8271 (cell); 913.758.6320 (w)
	Dale Ramsey, MM – org, dir	816.322.8985 or 816.797.3014 (cell)
	Ann Marie Rigler, DMA – org, lit	816.415.3792 or 816.781.7700x5199
	James Snyder, DMA – org, dir	816.765.1721 or 816.719.3289
	Sunny Son - org, lit	(Saturdays only) 785.230.9078 (h) or 785.843.0357 (w)
	Nancy Stankiewicz, BA – org., lit	913.642.8642
	Marilyn VanderLinden – org, lit	(very early or evening), 816.665.4441
	Ann Warzyn, BME, SPC – org	816.453.5027
	Roger Wischmeier, DMA, CAGO – org	(Wed & Sun. p.m.) 816.761.3811
	org=organist; lit=liturgical worship; dir=choral director; pian=pianist

The absolute deadline for submissions to Bombarde's editor is the 20th of each month. Please email your information to bombarde@kcago.com.

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