Just listened to: The Goat Rodeo Sessions (2011) by Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer & Chris Thile. A chamber-grass masterclass. 🎧 🎵

If Spotify “DJ” interrupts my listening one more time, I will switch to Apple Music.

Why does my heart resist listening to music alone? For the same reason it resists watching audiovisual entertainment and reading books alone: It’s alone. It’s one thing when I’m by myself anyway, but if people are around, what the heck!?

I want to listen to more music. I want to make more music. Would one album a day be too much? Would one half-hour practice or jam session be too much?

“Orange Crush” (1988) sounds like R.E.M. had been listening to a lot of U2.

I do confess my having daydreamed today about fronting a U2 and Britpop cover band with college friends Aaron G., Jason, Aaron R., and Adam R., with Josh A. joining for acoustic numbers.

Ironically, and with apologies to Josh, it was late U2 (“Red Flag Day”) that first inspired the daydream. Also, friend of friend Chris F. was there, too, but I wasn’t sure how to fit in so many guitarists.

Scott: What needs to happen for a bill to become law?
Éa: Oh, I know! The bill needs to sing a song! 🎵

When it comes time to make music, think: How is this love?

You only have so much time left with your kids in the house. Prioritize spending time with them. Make music with Éa!

Things I learned yesterday:

• It is inadvisable to begin working out at 9 PM. Choose sleep over exercise every time.
• Graeme hates the Beatles.
• My “metanoiac” theory of the atonement, which I attempted to explain to Mark Troyer, has legs and probably ought to be written out.
• Wearing masks all day at work feels tiresome.
• The Christmas party at work has been canceled.

Man, that piccolo really makes your biceps pop!

— Sullivan

Oh, that? That’s just smooth jazz. Nothing to worry about.

— Sullivan, replying to an inquiry over his headset while playing Minecraft one night

Remember that if it’s late in the evening and you’re tired but don’t think it best to go to bed just yet, listening to music is the perfect fit.

Today I am grateful for the following:

1. the self-control Éa is demonstrating as she practices her first riff on her new Washburn Maverick electric guitar (“Smoke On The Water,” of course)—let’s hope she has the self-control enough to power through the rut of learning your first riff and never moving past it because it’s the only thing you’ve mastered;
2. the goodness of setting aside time to walk, read, engage in hobbies, and journal. May my good friend learn it, too;
3. the faithfulness of Carla, my wife of coming on fifteen years next year. Whoa.

Perhaps the joy is lost from listening to and making music largely because it feels desultory: There’s no goal. At least, that’s what it seems like the Spirit may be saying as I possibly discerned on my walk to and from Gary Abdullah’s house to drop off an apology note written by Sullivan for his having tripped over an electrical cord and unplugged Inflatable Christmas Countdown Santa. So, here’s a goal in the absence of a relish for musical theatre, anthem gigs at college basketball games, Puddintown Roots, and the Choral Society: Build your repertoire book.

He picked one and broke it in two. The flesh was dryish and bread-like, something of the same kind as a banana. It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food—the delight of munching and being nourished, a “Sober certainty of waking bliss.” A man, or at least a man like Ransom, felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he present did. The gourds would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation.”

— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra

I laughed out loud at the last line.

“Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.”

— C.S. Lewis • Perelandra •

[edit, 1/23/26: Clearly, this sentiment predates the advent of music streaming services. In the past year I have heard the same symphony twice in one day on multiple days. And I didn’t even need to ask.]

“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

On the English supposed “quiet suspicion of sensuality” that he saw in the old English. It made me laugh out loud.

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

This captures why my sexual ethics.

“Much as we should be grateful for the language and liturgy of the Anglican Church, we must deplore the weird interdiction which killed of polyphony at the very moment when Tallis and Byrd…had learned to rival Palestrina and Victoria in this supremely religious art form.”

The Anglicans outlawed polyphony?

“Jesus, the first and last, On thee my soul is cast: Thou didst the work begin By blotting out my sin; Thou wilt the root remove, And perfect me in love.

“Yet when the work is done The work is but begun: Partaker of thy grace, I long to see thy face; The first I prove below, The last I die to know” (105, from the Book of Common Prayer).

It’s the last couplet that excites me most.

“…we belted out this famous hymn…to the music of Mendelssohn, that gentle fellow-traveller of the Christian faith whom Queen Victoria, then head of the Anglican Church, took to her heart, as the Church did also, despite the fact, and also because of the fact, that he was a Jew.”

Mendelssohn was a Jew!? He has written some of the strongest Christian sacred music of all time!

“…and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding” (167).

Is this true?

“By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful” (170).

A rhetorically fun point that Scruton makes about English Liberal Arts education. I do wonder if it’s true.

“How, for example, can you represent the interests of dead and unborn Englishmen, merely by counting the votes of the living? And how, in a system where important issues are determined by majority voting, do we protect the dissident minority, the individual eccentric, the person who will not or cannot conform?” (174)

I love the idea of thinking in terms of representing future, unborn compatriots in one’s government. And I appreciate Scruton’s praise for the common law in England which enables such lawmaking.

“Without what Freud call the ‘work of mourning’ we are diminished by our losses, and unable to live to the full beyond them” (244).

I know this to be true. I wonder whether I’m doing it for my mom. I want to make sure I make plenty space for others to mourn when I die.

“For dead civilizations can speak to living people, and the more conscious they are while dying, the more fertile is their influence thereafter” (244).

The same is true of dead people. I wish to be conscious while I’m dying.

Scruton, Roger. England : an elegy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Print.

I’m through with performing music for only the bourgeoisie. It’s time to visit prisoners and sick folks and sing for them.

Pop, where innovation is primarily sonic. Classical, where innovation is primarily musical. Jazz, where innovation is…innovative.

When I am deciding what to read next, I will consider listening to musical works and Science Mike podcast episodes as well.

Hymns are the way to catechize the kids.

Feminism is chivalry.

This spoken after I saw a gal at Torta’s wearing a “Girls to the Front” jacket, which has something to do with Riot Grrrrls, which is a feminist music movement out of the Pacific Northwest.

Even though my feet ache, I’m still gonna rock and shake!

— Éa, in the middle of a marathon of energetic dancing at Megan’s wedding

I feel better dancing when I’m on a precarious rock wall.

— Sullivan, explaining why he was dancing all by himself on a rock wall outside the tent at Megan’s wedding