March 8, 2016 by willedare

A Beating Heart

I recently spent an afternoon at Doug Hammer‘s studio, recording songs by Rodgers & Hart and then working on one of my original compositions, called “A Beating Heart,” which you can play by clicking on the left side of the bar below this paragraph.

A careful reader of this blog might recall that I included a Garageband version of this song in a post on April 9, 2014.

Since then Doug and I have begun creating piano/vocal versions of many of my songs so that we can perform them at places like Third Life Studio in Union Square, Somerville.

We got a lot of positive feedback after our debut performance there in December with guest vocalist Jinny Sagorin — and we’ll be returning at the end of April to reprise that show.

With so many huge and important things happening on planet earth right now — such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity, our human over-consumption of shared resources, and even the astoundingly unlikely presidential campaign here in the US — I often wonder how my original songs fit into the larger equations of life on planet earth.

Is my desire to share them with a wider audience (“Me, me, me, me! Look at me! Listen to me!”) simply another manifestation of the grossly self-oriented human trend in behavior which is currently tipping our larger ecological feedback loops further out of balance?

To re-center myself, I think of a poster in the bathroom where I get acupuncture which features some of the Dalai Lama’s wisdom:

“Ultimately, the decision to save the environment must come from the human heart. The key point is a call for a genuine sense of universal responsibility that is based on love, compassion and clear awareness.”

He has also written:

“Today more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to all other forms of life.”

However, we human beings still tend to think and plan and speak and act with human ‘tunnel vision.’

I often listen to a radio program on Friday afternoons, and last week the host, Ira Flatow, was discussing asteroids and comets. He mentioned one which flattened 770 square miles of forest in Siberia on June 30, 1908 — adding that luckily no one was hurt.

Wikipedia uses similar language in its description of what is called the Tunguska event, saying that it “caused no known casualties.”

I would modify that to read, “no HUMAN casualties.”

770 square miles is roughly the size of the entire greater Boston area.

All sorts of living beings — trees, eagles, ants, berry bushes, wolves, beetles, moose, falcons, reindeer, elk, plants, bears, storks, robins, bees, nightingales, mushrooms, bacteria, etc. — must have been hurt and/or killed.

Why do we human beings so easily ignore or dismiss non-human death and suffering?

How can we be so deeply ignorant of the profound and crucial ways our human lives are interconnected with the lives of innumerable non-human beings here on planet earth?

The most obvious example of this is the fact that we animals breathe out what plants breathe in. And vice versa. It’s an extraordinary bond between plants (trees, shrubs, phytoplankton, algae, grass, etc.) and animals (dolphins, ants, chickens, worms, orangutans, etc.)

And us.

We human beings are also animals.

We depend upon the health of the plant world for our human health.

Healthy trees and healthy forests and healthy phytoplankton and healthy oceans are not optional.

They are vital to the health of all of us.

I agree with the Dalai Lama that we human beings need to experience and understand on an open-hearted, emotional level that our daily lives ARE deeply connected to the lives of all other beings on planet earth.

And the health of those other beings IS intricately connected with our own health and survival.

This is where I see music playing a part in the larger equations unfolding on planet earth.

I know that music — both making it and listening to it — helps me re-open my heart and get in touch with my feelings.

And I see each week in my Music Together classes how singing and dancing and playing as a group can create a community of joy and humor and respect in 45 minutes which continues to ripple — gently and positively — throughout the week in the lives of the families who attend class.

So I will take a deep breath (like a whale!) and dive through my ambivalence about self-promotion into a starboard sea full of hope, love, respect, education, playfulness, creativity, compassion, song, and dance.

And occasional blog posts.

Deep breath in.

Deep breath out.

Thank you for reading and listening!

I found the lovely photos in this post from a site called Pixabay.

And if you’d like to listen to “A Beating Heart” on a digital music platform such as Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, you can click here.

You are always welcome to visit my website — where you can find many songs (and learn more about my musical life here on planet earth if you are curious).

You can also find me singing all sorts of songs on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, YouTube and other digital music platforms.

August 31, 2015 by willedare

Everything Is Holy Now

Summer lily

I first heard Peter Mayer’s song “Holy Now” on a recording by the delicious trio of Ellen Epstein, Michael Cicone and Cindy Kallet.

It’s what I call a “gets me out of bed in the morning” song.

Inspiring.

Thought-provoking.

The sort of song I love to perform — and aspire to write.

I listened to it over and over again — and then went to Doug Hammer’s recording studio, where we recorded a few takes (the second one of which you can hear in the player at the top of this post…)

Every now and then I remember to bring a camera and take photos while I am traveling. Sometimes I even manage to upload them onto my laptop. And on very rare occasions I find the time to look at some of them.

The images in this post are from the summer of 2011 — and feel like they match the sprit of Peter Mayer’s song.

Chicory

Chicory is a wonderful plant which grows all over the place — from farm fields to urban roadways. I love the flowers’ shade of blue, which reminds me of a clear summer sky.

I am also deeply reassured by the way it is able to take root, survive, and even bloom in what appear to be extremely inhospitable locations — with very little soil or access to water.

Hurrah for the resourcefulness of weeds!

Ryder & Toad

Here is one of my nephews interacting with a toad next to Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. Ryder lives in southern California and will happily sing the entire song “Uptown Funk” (by Mick Ronson featuring Bruno Mars) if you ask him to.

This is my other nephew and my niece with my older sister (their mother) in the background by their garden in upstate New York.

They love each other very much.

Although originally from Detroit, MI, they have grown up on a farm.

I feel inordinately blessed to be the uncle of three such delightful human beings.

These are peaches growing on a little tree my mother and step father planted in Connecticut. I am astounded at how much fruit even a small tree can create — seemingly out of thin air!

Trees amaze me in so many ways.

I was looking at photos of the thousand year-old redwoods in California recently, trying to imagine what their sense of time might feel like…

I am impressed by how much patience and trust a plant has to have — that it will get enough rain, for example — since it cannot get up and move around the way we animals do.

And how generous they are to feed us with their fruit, their nuts, their berries — although it is hard to know whether they are generous because they want to be or because they have no other option…

Isn’t this Asian pear beautiful? How does the tree grow it?!

And let’s not forget our invaluable allies — the bees, bats and birds who pollinate different plants and — according to recent statistics I read in an article about bee health — are responsible for the cultivation of a third of the food we humans eat…

What an amazing system: beautiful flowers which delight our human eyes and attract (and perhaps also delight) billions of extremely hard-working and diligent pollinators whose diligent work leads to delicious, nutritious food for so many beings — many of them human — to eat.

And it’s powered by photons traveling through space from a nearby star.

And it’s assisted by water which falls from the sky, is sucked up by the plants’ roots, is incorporated into leaves and flowers and fruits and berries, and eventually evaporates back into the sky — only to begin the cycle again.

What a planet!

As Peter writes in his song, “The challenging thing becomes not to look for miracles — but finding where there isn’t one…”

Thank you for reading and listening to yet another blog post.

August 13, 2015 by willedare

Love who (and what) you love…

I just returned from thirteen days of heaven on earth a.k.a. camping at North of Highland Campground in North Truro, MA (near the tip of Cape Cod).

One of the things I most love about camping is the lack of interruptions and distractions.

Life is distilled down to basics — and things like TV and America’s Got Talent and Netflix and Orange Is the New Black simply disappear from one’s awareness.

I did not speak with anyone via the telephone.

There was no internet tempting me to visit Facebook or Linked In.

I had no emails reminding me each day about a deeply discouraging array of horrible things happening all over planet earth which I could possibly help by signing a petition and/or donating money.

I listened to no radio.

I read very few magazines (mostly back issues of The New Yorker).

I received no snail mail full of solicitations from environmental defense organizations and prograssive lobbying groups and hard-working political candidates.

Instead I savored the rain and the sun.

And birds.

And wind in the pine trees overhead.

And random sounds of fellow campers in the distance — sometimes the beep of a car with keys left in the ignition, sometimes the cry of a small child having an emotional melt down.

And BLUEBERRIES.

This year we arrived at the peak of blueberry abundance.

Little scrubby bushes which in past summers might have offered a few berries were now covered with them.

Each morning before the sun became too hot, I picked a mug-full to eat — first with oatmeal and then as an anti-oxidant treat throughout the rest of the day.

Some bushes had small berries, and others were loaded with whoppers.

On the morning of our departure, I picked one final mug’s worth to bring home to Arlington, and I am eating the last of them as I type this entry.

Yum for summer!

At first I was concerned that I might be depriving the local wild life of much-needed sustenance.

One morning I watched a small red squirrel pick blueberries, climb up on a small tree stump to eat them, climb down to pick more, climb back up to eat more until she or he apparently had eaten their fill and frisked off into the trees.

But that was the only animal consumption I witnessed.

And I saw many wrinkled, older berries on the ground under the bushes — so plenty of them were ripening and falling to the ground untouched by anyone.

I decided it was OK to revel in this unexpected, beautiful, delicious gift from mother earth.

And there were many berries I did not manage to pick and eat when we left our camp site…

Maybe the two wild turkeys we saw as we were packing up camp would return to savor them?

This morning I was given a link to a slide show that a father had put together to play at the memorial service for his four-year-old son, who had died as a result of complications after an unsuccessful heart transplant operation.

This radiant little being was a student of a fellow Music Together (MT) teacher, and she had reached out via Facebook to a bunch of MT teachers when he was about to go into surgery so that we might pray for him and his family and his caregivers.

Despite the massive amounts of time Aiden had spent in hospitals during his short, sweet life, he was able to stomp in rain puddles and play at the beach and attend Music Together classes with his parents.

Apparently he loved singing and dancing — and his parents included several MT songs as part of his slide show and memorial service.

From the slide show I could see how loved he was by his extended family.

And as a result of watching it, I brought an aching awareness of love and loss with me to my Music Together class this morning — and did my best to welcome and celebrate each being who came though the door.

The song at the beginning of this post was written by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty for a musical called A Man Of No Importance.

I recorded it with Doug Hammer playing piano and Mike Callahan playing horn several years ago as part of my “Will Loves Steve” show — which featured songs written or co-written by people named Steve or Stephen or Stevie.

For me it captures some of the poignance of being a loving human here on planet earth.

Thank you for reading and listening!

August 21, 2013 by willedare

Singing Together

I just spent a day rehearsing for a performance in Tiverton, RI.

It’s a new show called “In Perfect Harmony” with fellow singer Bobbi Carrey and pianist/composer Doug Hammer — in which all the songs include at least a partial harmony somewhere.

Because we have been performing together for ten years — and since one of our favorite things to do is sing in harmony — we have a lot of material to choose from.

The show also includes quotations and anecdotes about the process of collaboration — which for us has involved a great arranger, Mike Callahan.

From time to time we send Mike recordings from our rehearsals, along with detailed notes about which harmonic ideas we think show promise and which need help.

Invariably he sends charts back to us that both improve our ideas AND surprise us with some great new musical impulses.

At the top of this blog post is our version of the Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini classic “Moon River” if you are curious to hear the fruits of this collaborative process.

Deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

There is something very intimate and satisfying about singing with someone else — whether in unison or harmony.

And since electricity entered — and in many ways took over — our daily lives during the last century, our patterns and habits of singing have certainly evolved…

Crooning along with the radio or a CD or a song being streamed on Pandora or Spotify is great — yet it’s very different from singing with another real live human being in the present moment.

I just returned from a week in upstate NY at a wonderful, ramshackle family cottage with no internet access and no TV called the Rice Heritage.

My great grandfather James E. Rice bought this cottage (I think from fellow Cornell professors John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock — who was the first woman to become a professor at Cornell University).

James E. Rice was a professor of poultry science at Cornell and had a farm — called the Egg and Apple Farm on Rice Road — just up the hill from this cottage in Trumansburg, NY.

He and his wife Elsie Van Buren Rice raised six children — three girls and three boys — almost all of whom ended up owning farms, too, when they grew up and married.

Sadly, however, Elsie died when their youngest daughter was still a teenager.

James ended up leaving the family’s cottage — overlooking Cayuga Lake — to his six children plus their descendants.

And many of his descendants continue to take turns staying there each summer in one- and two-week increments of time.

This summer one of my older cousins told me about songs she had heard as a child from her parents and grandparents — some of which were originally sung by people working outside in gardens and fields as a way (according to my cousin) to pass the time and remain connected with their neighbors.

The downhill view of dock and boathouse…

What a different era — and mode — of human connectedness!

Another deep breath in.

And deep breath out.

Using my ukulele and the great “Daily Ukulele” songbooks, we sang together most nights on the beach around a camp fire — while the younger members of our family roasted marshmallows and made s’mores for all to eat.

Yum!

I could do this for hours — and in fact on the last night I did play without a break for over three hours.

Music.

Stars above.

Friends and family all around.

Lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.

Bliss.

THANK YOU for reading — and listening to — this (recently updated) blog post.

Thank you, too, to Bobbi Carrey, Doug Hammer and Mike Callahan for their musical contributions.

Thank you to Pixabay for the lovely photos of hydrangeas!

Thank you to my great grandfather and great grandmother for their generous foresight in buying this cottage and then leaving it to their descendants.

And thank you to all of my cousins who have pitched in — decade after decade — to keep the Rice Heritage intact and functional for generations to come.

Hurrah for summer!

amusicalifeonplanetearth

Music and the Thoughts It Can Inspire

Nature

A Beating Heart

Everything Is Holy Now

Love who (and what) you love…

Singing Together