Naomi Stephan - Composer journal nistephan [ website | Alternative Choral Music ] [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ]

Terror Threat a Bluff [13 Sep 2004|01:44pm] Finally someone has come along and said what I have thought all along. There is no Threat of Terror nor has there ever been one. It is a bluff by Bush and Co to keep the atmosphere of fear going. I recommend the article written by Bart Kosko, a professor of probability and statistics at USC., in today's Los Angeles Times. He outlines brilliantly that there is no increase in deaths by terrorism worldwide (according to the State Department). Deaths by terrorism don't even come close to the 15,000 deaths a year through murder in the US, (many of which perpertrated in that sanca sanctorum - the Beatified Family) and pale in comparison to the 40,000 deaths a year in car accidents. Terrorism has been grossly exaggerated. Now some thought by me: How has this “Terrism” happened? Well, if people are kept infantalized, in a state of cowering catatonic angst - much like an abusive parent does - it creates a greater dependence on the abusive parent. This was made clear to me in a brilliant photography exhibit some years back with pictures of families with a parent who had abused one of their children. The photos were taken at precisely the moment the child returned from foster care, and always showed the child running into the arms of the abusive parent. Moreover, studies who that negativity sticks in peoples minds, not positive messages. Presto change-o a perfect formula for Bush to make us believe we are unsafe if we don’t reselect him. It is axiomatic, then that there is no War on Terrorism. Just aggressive acts of violence by this nation against a pitiful nation of 20+ million who hadn’t bothered us ever. Read my lips: •9/11 has not changed my world much (except for the long lines when I fly) •I am not afraid of terrorists •Religious fanatics and bigots are more dangerous than any terrorist. •The biggest flip flopper of all is Bush. (more on this later) •The election of 2000 was a farce •A good number of those of voting age is dummer than cows in a stampede, beginning with Bush.

Control Room - August 20 [20 Aug 2004|09:22am] I just saw Control Room, a gripping documentary directed by Jehane Neujaim. In a quote by a reviewer, this film " . . . is an in-depth and riveting look at Al Jazeera, the TV news network run by Islamic directors, reporters and technical staff. Virtually all of the film focuses on the satellite station's coverage of Iraq since the U.S. invasion. The pictures are ugly, the dialog often alarming, the relevance breath-takingly important." Unlike Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 , Neujaim stays completely out of the picture. There are no voice overs to suggest what we might want to feel or think. The footage speaks for itself. Several people in the theater left during the middle. My guess is that they could not stomach the images American Television has refused to show: mutilated bodies of American and Iraqis, especially Iraqi children. Equally disturbing were the in(s)ane and clueless comments of the US military, the frustration of the Media in getting correct information from the military, and the attacks on civilians accompanied by vile, profane curses of US soldiers. No beeping here. So much for our brave and wonderful troops. Before you decide on your vote in November, I suggest you see this film.

August 6, 2004 [06 Aug 2004|03:20pm] Today is the anniversary of our bombing of Hiroshima, if my memory serves me right. This was one of scores of towns the US bombed in Japan, by all accounts no longer necessary, just as Dresden was not necessary -even though it was done in retalliation for Coventry. On June 22 I had the thrill of seeing the dome and cross of the Frauenkirche in Dresden raised to its final resting place atop the tower of the Frauenkirche. 78 tons, made of copper and brass in Coventry as a gift to Dresden, and accompanied by music, brass choirs, a boy's choir a speech (in German) by the Duke of Kent. Blessed by the roar of the crowd, it symbolized the reconciliation between two ancient and wonderful cultural sites. And then there is the shock and awe laden bombing of Bagdad, (instead of Bin Laden). WMD - who has them? The US does and has used them consistenly. Why does no one demand that we destroy them? Surely not because we would use them responsibly (see above).

July 18, 2004 [18 Jul 2004|10:46am] July 18, 2004 It has been a long time since I have made an entry. Several trips, some urgent deadlines, a computer crash, and some piddly things have gotten in the way. But now I am back, and I hope with greater regularity. Perhaps I should begin with the recent hullabaloo over Gay Marriage (= marriage rights for those who are Gay.) I myself got married to my partner last February. whether or not it is "legal" with the ruling class, we will see. Perhaps I can begin with the letter I wrote to the LATimes, which was printed, although watered down and leaving out the third example I made in the letter: **** To the Editor: I wonder how the Bushies and the the Congress Cons will explain their mantra that marriage is between a "man and a woman." Has anyone challenged them publicly to define what a man is and a woman is? So tell me Dubya et al: are Mianne Bagger a transsexual, who recently was welcomed by the LPGA to play in the Australian open, and the Mexican football player turned female singer (recently featured in the LA Times) a man or a woman? Whom would they be "allowed" to marry? Or how about a colleague I know, whose wife was male until the age of 12, and then remade into a woman, replete with artificial vagina? That the Dems allow themselves to be painted into the corner on this issue is both enfuriating and pathetic. Get a life, religious rite. After all, your own child might be a lesbian - or a transsexual, or anything in between. Naomi Stephan **** Today I am seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Outfoxed" should be fun for this disgusted liberal. Digusted at both political parties. More soon. Naomi

March 24, 2004 [24 Mar 2004|05:41pm] I attended a Youth Symphony Concert on Monday evening in Ojai (CA), and a choral festival the next day in another county. By my tally, in the Youth Symphony there were there were eight composers, and none of them were women. In the choral festival, we heard pieces from 42 composers in all of which 35 were male and 5 female, or a ratio of 7:1. What message are we giving to kids? To the public? To the audience? No wonder I have heard many times that women "just can't hack it as composers. If it were not so, there would be pieces to play." I suppose by that reasoning, we could have said that blacks and women can't hack it as athletes, until Jackie Robinson broke the barrier, or women got Title IX. And now the best down hill ski jump effort is from an 18 year old Norwegian woman, who bested all her teammates, but still can't compete in the Olympics. Why? Well, there just aren't that many women ski jumpers around to make the event worth practical. Do Olympic Committee men really have this kind of logic? I will continue to be a composer activist, no matter what the obstacles out there. Find a cause you believe in and go for it. Just make sure it doesn't exclude people from their rights. Naomi

March 23, 2004 [23 Mar 2004|06:06pm] "If I do a heart bypass, I will surely have one later." Or perhaps what comes around goes around. Our most important partner is our divine talent or mission. Leave her behind and she will kick your behind. Sometimes called tough love. Although unlike a lover, she will not leave. How many times has something else been more important rather than cuddling up with your creativity? I know, I had bypassed that opportunity many times. If you break down, do you find a way to pay for the repair? How about your car? If your car comes first, then some re-vision is necessary. As that wonderful 12 Step Program Arts Anonymous says: Just spend five minutes a day with your talent. All you need to do is start somewhere, and give your dream some time, just five minutes a day. That five minutes will turn into more as soon as you feed it. Just like a plant. Naomi

March 22, 2004 [22 Mar 2004|05:54pm] March 22, 2004 Re: separation. The worst thing in my opinion is to be separated from the talent one has. That is like cutting out one's own heart. When I divorced from my singing career, I fell into a deep and abiding sadness/depression. Only it didn't happen right away. It took years to realize what I had done to myself. Slowly, the nagging feeling that I had abandoned the thing I loved most, which was singing Oratorios, Cantatas and Lieder, welled up in me and brought a profound grief the likes of which I had not yet experienced. How could I as a Lesbian and someone who had distanced herself from her confessional upbringing ever get beyond the texts to sing the music? It was a conundrum and a problem I had no solution for, but to escape into a "pragmatic" career of being a Professor of German. I loved the music, but the lyrics were not something I could identify with. In my discussion with the aforementioned colleague, he wrote that we all have to overcome a certain kind of disenfranchisement to our text (music with words, that is), and find our way to the text in whatever way we can. But if your choice begins with a point of view that unleashes condemnation of the public (i.e. wanting to sing to a person of your own Gender), then the matter becomes an emotional quagmire. I can make those changes in my head with Bach, but not with love songs to a man. I hope for the day when all this no longer matters. Naomi

March 21, 2004 [21 Mar 2004|10:05pm] March 21, is Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday. I celebrated today by played a beautiful recording of two of his solo Cantatas, Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut and Ich habe genug, sung by Lorraine Hunt. Such a marvelous voice. I have rarely heard an interpreter of Bach's Cantatas with such feeling. Thank you JSB for writing it. Another event, yesterday intersected with Bach's birthday. I saw the German film Good Bye Lenin. As you will learn, if you follow these musings at all, I like to make connections. So what is the connection between these two works? During the film, I began to have a sense of sadness. After the film, my buddy and compatriot Sue helped me analyze what this was all about. Turns out it had to do with separation. In the film, Alex, a young East German helps his comatose mother avoid another heart attack by keeping alive the illusion of the two Germanies. {His mother, a staunch communist, was in a coma at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.) Any further shock would surely bring on another heart attack. But after the mother wakes up from her coma, the charade must go on. The point here is that I felt sad at the separation of East from West Germany, whle understanding how after the fall of the wall the East still could be nostalgic for their former way of life. This matter of separation reminded me of other kinds of separation in my life: separation from my family because I am a Lesbian, separation from Germany when I came back to the states, separation from this country emotionally and politically during this turn to right wing policies, and separation - and here is where Bach and the cantata come in: separation from my career as a singer of Bach and his glorious music. In my twenties it simply did not occur to me that I could have made a career of singing Bach or Lieder, or Early Music, a highly rarified and certainly not financially supportable career. In my mind, if I was going to sing and support myself, it would have to be Opera or pop, which I did not want to do. So I separated from my greatest gift, and not without great pain and grief. Indeed,there were more factors to this separation, which I will talk about tomorrow. Naomi

March 19, 2004 [19 Mar 2004|05:04pm] March 19, 2004 I love Sue's poem Poetry Class: I quote it here: write anything on a piece of paper a phone number a conundrum a recipe your name a want ad for used firewood the letter Z write anything blankness blossoms into meaning words flow forth from silence distinct specificity with felicity. Sue Carroll Moore Sometimes when I don't know what to write, I think of this poem. Naomi

March 18, 2004 [18 Mar 2004|08:15pm] March 18, 2004 I have been discussing with a colleague on a music list, the importance and relevance of gender to music and how being a Lesbian can have a profound effect on one's performance, i.e. to identify with the text one is singing. People have been writing me with sentences something like this: "As a long-time singer, composer and conductor of a variety of choral ensembles, I fail to see any relevance whatsoever as to sexual orientation" shows me that I see things very differently from the straight world. The most important point he made was that in singing a song, we are all disenfrachised from our subject to a certain extent, in that we cannot be in the shoes of the person completely and utterly, and thus must find a way to express the content and emotion of the song no matter what our personal reference point is. He related that his daughter was told to think of a cat she loved while singing a song about a woman in love with her newly wed husband, since the daughter had had problems with men in the past, and could not use this image to connect. You can always find a way to connect even if disenfranchised, was his point. I replied: "Your points are interesting and cogent. Obviously, each of us cannot ever be in the exact same shoes of the poet or the songwriter, and must find some way to connect to the person or situation one is singing about. For example, as a person who scarcely ever goes digging in the garden, let alone uses a shovel, I cannot be even close to a Gravedigger in "Gravedigger's Lament" although I can connect with his pain. (In my desperation to avoid love songs to a man I picked such songs for my voice lessons, and my teacher couldn't understand why I wanted to sing such dark strange material. At the time I wasn't able to talk about my sexual origin.)" "But the cat as a reference point to one's beloved when one is singing about a wedding ring? Mon Dieu. As a voice teacher, I find that a bit of a stretch, but I guess to each her own. But here is where the analogy ends." "In a psychology experiment, two groups were given a test to take, in adjoining soundproof rooms. Both were presented with heavy distracting and jarring music accompanying their test taking. Group A however, was given the option to press a button and turn off the music. Who had the best scores? Group A of course. Ah but here is the rub. Group A did NOT turn off the jarring music. The perception that they COULD, in the conclusion of the psychologists, constituted the leading edge for them." "Perceiving one's self as having options whether actual or imagined is the point here. Given options, I can step into any role that I desire. Now suppose your daughter was told: you can choose a cat but remember it is wrong to love cats, you will sin if you do, you will be considered a freak, you could lose your job, get an F in class, or be ridiculed. How well would your daughter connect by picking a beloved cat as her reference point? It would invalidate her participation, to use your words." So then, in the land of cat discrimination, I would tell her, okay, you can pick the cat as long as you imagine that the cat is a woman (because that would be acceptable in this mythical kingdom). Ah but I don't want to be singing to a woman! Besides, who wants to go through such machinations? Dawn Upshaw held a master class in voice, which I recently attended. A young singer picked a Strauss song in which a woman clearly sings to a woman. The Soprano expressed difficulty with this, so Upshaw said, "just replace her with a man. Not "Just imagine a woman you love and sing to her." That clearly was not an option for Upshaw. I so wanted to sing Schumann's Dichterliebe in my student days in Germany, but as my accompanist cautioned, "Well, you know what kind of women would want to do THAT." At the time it didn't take much to squelch me and my feelings. Again, it invalidated my participation. This is what countless gay and lesbian musicians have suffered through the years, some surviving better than others. Most of us have unconsciously internalized the negation of our very beings. Now I know it is okay to sing Dichterliebe and I have done so for years. But that hasn't yet translated itself into the general audience acceptance. My last thought: even Charlize Theron could find her way to portray a prostitute who killed a number of men. But you will note that in almost all cases where a Lesbian (which I believe she was not even if so designated) is the character, she is played by straights? ("The Children's Hour", "Boys Don't Cry," "Monster" and of late "The L Word" on Cable). Lesbian characters hit the big screen only when they have a defect, are deranged, die, kill or are sex crazed. No goodness, no greatness of character, no redemption. I find it highly ironic, incidentally, that Lesbians are not selected to portray Lesbians. But this is a digression. Kind regards, Naomi

March 17, 2004 [17 Mar 2004|05:53pm] March 17, 2004 The introduction to Fulfill Your Soul's Purpose begins with "This book is like a musical composition. It has a creator, but she can only be heard with the help of others." However, unlike her sister genre, writing, the ability to compose is still shrouded in mystery. While most people know how to write well enough to leave a note for the UPS driver (although when I read the letters to the editor, I sometimes wonder), only a few people can actually take a pencil and write notes on a staff in a meaningful way. It is a highly complex, rarified skill that requires a lot of study, discipline, trial and error, and of course talent. Even those with innate musical genius have to spend considerable time learning the skills required to create an effective composition. Much of the study requires an understanding of musical notation, that white Western invention which has enriched our lives with a system that allows me, the composer, to transfer the sounds in my head to my hand and then to paper. Returning to my opening sentence it then takes someone to help translate that music notation into actual instrumental or vocal sounds. Aye there's the rub. I realized that musical notation creates the great divide between those who read music and those who don't, when I was teaching a course in Women and Music. The class was divided almost 50/50 between those who could read and those who didn't. (Back to my analogy with literature, the inability to read is generally not an overwhelming problem in college literature classes, although my literary colleagues might beg to differ.) But 50/50 is deceptive. Many students who enrolled in this class were already among the minority of those who could read music. The actual figure between readers and non readers is more like 10/90 I would guess. Small wonder, then, that most people who do not read music view notes on paper with a mixture of awe and fear. I was in an aisle seat a plane working on a composition (the old fashioned way with pencil and notation paper) and people would come down the aisle, look at the notation paper and then back at me, and I could hear the wheels turning in their head about what to ask: "How do you do that?" "What are you doing anyway?" "Is that fun?" "What are you writing?" (I am glad I was not Schoenberg, saying "Well, I am writing a series of 12 notes which can be ordered in any way you want and then varied as desired - here let me sing a row for you") Musical terrorist? Anyway, most were curious and a few confessed to me in whispers that they too had once composed some pieces, but then family and mortgages took over . . . . But then, that is a discussion for my other web site.

March 16, 2004 [16 Mar 2004|04:11pm] Hi there: Well I have joined the blog world. And I am glad to be sharing with you some of my thoughts - mostly musings on musical matters, but not limited to that. Whatever comes up. And you can respond if you like, leave your name in the guest book, read and reflect, or just have a look. I never thought of myself as a writer. In college, my composition prof was an arrogant disaffected grad student who announced at the beginning of the first class that "50% of you will fail this course" and then proceeded to write an elaborate grading scale on the blackboard from A+ to F-. Something like every three points down from 100 amounted to the next lower grade. So A began at 97, and so on down to 55. There was not to be anything about how wonderful writing is, how he would inspire us to be like Emerson, Shakespeare, Doris Lessing or Susan Sontag, (well Sontag might not have been writing back then). Sure, if he had so expounded, we would probably have rolled our eyes and sighed, looking out the window of the Quonset hut for anything interesting to distract. Suffice it to say I was singularly uninspired and got the only 2 C's of my college career, C's which probably knocked me out of the summa cum laude category down to magna. But that meltdown kept me humble, wouldn't you say? Nary a written word left my pen except for letters home from Europe "I feel as if everyone is leaving (Berlin). It's like Custard's Last Stand." My mother saved the card. But in the 1980's, my partner Sue Moore inspired me to begin writing a non-fiction book called Fulfill Your Soul's Purpose, about how you find your true, authentic calling in life (check out my other web site at http://www.lifemissionassociates.com. - as you will learn I am a shameless promoter) - since I had abandoned music in my 20's for a more pragmatic and stable career of teaching and had been in grief about it ever since. So I wrote that book now in its 4th edition, started a novel (not yet finished), returned at the same time to my neglected music, and started composing, the fruits of which presumably led you to this web site. So dear reader, I will leave you today with my sadness over the needless deaths and injuries in Spain. It baffles me how a nation that decried the War in Iraq (over 90%) would be seen, in the first election after September 11, 2001, as crumbling to terrorism. On the contrary, it was their first chance to say no to Bush and his terrorism. Brava to them. Naomi

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