Since June is the month for weddings, here are some helpful hints from Billy Ray Barnwell

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I’m getting ready this week to play for a wedding at our church, Ashley and Dustin are getting married, and they’re a lovely young couple, really they are, but every time I think of the phrase “Ashley and Dustin” I don’t see the beautiful blond girl and the handsome tall boy, what plays on the movie screen of my mind is, wouldn’t you know it, right out of the movies, only it’s kind of warped, I see Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy walking down the streets of Manhattan but Jon Voight is not walking next to him wearing that great fringed cowboy jacket, no, who I see walking next to Dustin Hoffman is Leslie Howard, the actor who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone With The Wind in 1939, he was the one that Scarlett O’Hara wanted and sweet Melanie got, and it really freaks me out as to why Dustin Hoffman would be walking with Leslie Howard, Leslie is all dressed up in his Ashley Wilkes Civil War uniform, gray for the Confederacy, and Dustin and Ashley are holding hands in my movie just like George W. Bush and that prince from Saudi Arabia did, maybe I’m finally going off the deep end, I’m sorry but that’s what I see, whatever happened to good old-fashioned names like Willard and Edna, Cletis and Eula Mae, Herb and Phyllis, Walter and Margaret, Arthur and Irma, Clarence and Mildred, Vernon and Gladys, you just knew with names like those that their marriages were solid as a rock, nobody ever got divorced in the old days, or if they did we don’t seem to have kept a record of it, they were pretty good back then about making their bed and lying in it, not like nowadays where if a relationship doesn’t make you tingle all over at all times you just shed it and try another one, it’s kind of a serial polygamy if you ask me, which I know you didn’t but I’m just saying, but at least Ashley and Dustin, the real ones I mean, not the figments of my overworked imagination, are getting married, they haven’t forsaken the institution, their mamas raised them right. So anyways I thought as a public service I would include a list of light classics that are suitable for playing at weddings, it’s also a fitting tribute to my piano teacher, Mrs. Alyne Eagan, who had polio when she was younger and walked with crutches but it didn’t keep her from driving a car and after I had taken piano lessons from her for about eight years she suddenly married a Mr. Cyrus and moved to Las Cruces New Mexico with her slightly crazy teen-aged son and the only person left in town who taught piano was Miss Clara Malone of Holly Springs Mississippi, how Miss Clara ever wound up in Not Grapevine Texas would prolly make a story in itself except I don’t know it, but I do know she couldn’t teach piano worth a lick, mostly she prepared people to go back to their church and play hymns out of their hymnbook, she was a Methodist but she preferred the Southern Baptists’ Broadman Hymnal to the Cokesbury, I never did know what Mrs. Eagan was but she would drive into Fort Worth every month and play for the Downtown Kiwanis Club’s monthly luncheon meeting and she claimed to have accompanied Ginger Rogers before she became a famous dancer and movie star, Ginger I mean, not Mrs. Eagan, now that would have been a sight to see, her doing everything Fred Astaire did only backwards and in high heels while also using crutches, well anyways back to the list of wedding music, there’s “Clair de Lune” which means moonlight and also “Reverie” which means reverie, both of them are by the French composer Claude Debussy, there’s “Liebestraum” which is German for Dream of Love by Franz Liszt, I always have to work hard to get the cadenzas right, and there are several good ones by Frederic Chopin which is pronounced SHO-pan such as his “Etude in E Major,” and there’s the “Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On A Theme By Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff, no kidding, that is what it is called, Eighteenth Variation From Rhapsody On a Theme By Paganini which is not by Paganini but by Rachmaninoff, the Variation I mean, not the Rhapsody, which is by Paganini, or maybe it’s the Theme, how confusing can you get, and by the way the composers’ names are pronounced SAIR-GAY Rock-MAH-nih-nawf and pagguh-NEE-nee respectively, one was Russian and the other was Italian, you might have heard it in the movie Somewhere In Time if you weren’t drooling over either Christopher Reeve or Jane Seymour, so if you want a classy wedding choose those pieces, I have also played at weddings where the bride wanted things like “Beauty And The Beast” which I definitely think sends the wrong message about the groom, or “The Little Mermaid,” Disney stuff, people have gotten away from songs by Karen Carpenter and that one by Noel Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary, I can never remember whether Noel was Peter or Paul but he definitely wasn’t Mary, and certain movie themes are popular like the themes from Ice Castles and Somewhere In Time and “Tara’s Theme” from Gone With The Wind, hey, there’s Gone With The Wind again, some of the older wedding music is completely dead and buried now, “Oh Promise Me” and “I Love You Truly” and “Because” to name three, they’d laugh you out of the church if you sang those today or maybe they’d just sit there in complete shock, oh one that is quite popular of late is “The Prayer” as sung by Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, it says so right on the sheet music, only most of the times I have heard it sung it hasn’t sounded the least bit like Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli, but at least people are still getting married and I have to hand it to Dustin and Ashley for respecting the institution of marriage, like I said, they were raised right, Ashley’s mother plays bass guitar in our church’s praise band and Dustin’s mom and dad sing alto and bass in the sanctuary choir, well to be precise his mom sings alto and his dad sings bass, I didn’t mean to imply that they both yodeled in the choir. I guess Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof was right, there’s something to be said for tradition, of course the Bible says that you have made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition, don’t get mad at me, Jesus is the one who said it, and by you and your he meant the scribes and the Pharisees, they were the ones he was talking to, so if you are neither a scribe nor a Pharisee then you needn’t get your panties in a wad or your knickers in a twist as they say in Great Britain which is also called the United Kingdom even though it has a queen, but if you are one, a scribe or a Pharisee I mean, not a queen, then do us all a favor and clean up your act, the world would be a much better place, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off.

[Editor’s note. The foregoing is Chapter 27 from Billy Ray Barnwell Here, a 2007 book written by my imaginary friend, nemesis, and alter ego, the one and only Billy Ray Barnwell. --RWP]

Christmas Day 2012

A prophet named Isaiah who lived in the eighth-century B.C. wrote, “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing.”

Until then, however, the blind and the lame will have to do the singing. I count myself among them.

Here’s Andrea Bocelli in a magnificent rendering of “Adeste Fideles” (3:32).

As a sort of parting gift to you to get you through my possible impending absence

...here are Andrea Bocelli and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “The Lord’s Prayer” (4:25).

This particular piece of music was written by a man named Albert Hay Malotte (1895 - 1964), about whom I knew absolutely nothing until I read about him in that ever-changing fount of all knowledge, or not, Wikipedia.

Here is an excerpt:

“Malotte composed a number of film scores, including mostly uncredited music for animations from the Disney studios. Although two movies for which he composed scores won best Short Subject Academy Awards (Ferdinand the Bull in 1939 and The Ugly Duckling in 1940), he is best remembered for a setting of the Lord's Prayer. Written in 1935, it was recorded by the baritone John Charles Thomas, and remained highly popular for use as a solo in churches and at weddings in the US for some decades.”

My six degrees of separation, or two, or whatever, from both Albert Hay Malotte and John Charles Thomas is the fact that when I was a child living in a third-floor apartment in a house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, around 1946 or 1947, I listened to that recording made by John Charles Thomas. It was one of two 78-rpm recordings that I played over and over on a huge wind-up, hand-cranked Victrola rather like this one:

The other recording I listened to over and over in those days was not sung by John Charles Thomas and it was not composed by Albert Hay Malotte. It was a country/western/hillbilly song called “I'm Goin’ Back to Whur I Come From” that included the immortal line, “whur the mockin’ bird is singin’ in the lilac bush” and here it is (2:51).

Parts of this post are ridiculous and parts of this post are sublime, and I’ll leave it to you to decide which are which.

O res mirabilis!

The Last Supper, Buoninsegna (c. 1255 - c. 1319)

It is interesting to me that in the painting above, seven of Christ’s disciples have haloes and five do not. I wonder why the artist painted them that way.

When I was a teenager, some of us who thought we were smart/cute/funny/all of the foregoing used to sing this highly irreverent jingle to the tune of the then-current Pepsi-Cola commercial:

Christianity hits the spot
Twelve apostles, that’s a lot
The Holy Ghost and the Virgin too
Christianity’s the thing for you.

Lightning did not strike us dead on the spot, evidence of God’s great love for and great patience with not-so-smart/cute/funny teenagers.

According to the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, the Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years and were fed miraculously with something they called “manna” (because they didn’t know what it was) that fell from heaven each day. They gathered up enough each morning to feed themselves for one day. If they tried to gather more than a day’s worth, it bred worms and stank. On the day before each Sabbath, on which they did not work because God had said, “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” they gathered enough manna for two days and it did not breed worms and stink. This is how the Israelites survived for forty years until they came to the Promised Land, which in actuality was only an eleven-days journey from Egypt. I guess GPS had not been invented yet.

According to the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth said, “I am that bread which came down from heaven” and also “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty” and also “I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

It’s all in the sixth chapter of The Gospel According To Saint John, which goes on to say that then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" and that Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.”

As people used to say back in the sixties, “Heavy, man.”

John also says that from this time many of Christ’s disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

Panis Angelicus, a hymn written by Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), has been set to music many times, perhaps most famously in 1872 by César Franck for voice, harp, cello, and organ.

Here are four renditions, one by Andrea Bocelli (3:58), one by Charlotte Church (4:00), one by Luciano Pavarotti (3:42), and one by Mirusia Louwerse (5:00).

Here is the Latin text of Panis Angelicus, with doxology:

Panis angelicus
fit panis hominum;
Dat panis coelicus
figuris terminum:
O res mirabilis!
Manducat Dominum
Pauper, servus et humilis.

Te trina Deitas
unaque poscimus:
Sic nos tu visita,
sicut te colimus;
Per tuas semitas
duc nos quo tendimus,
Ad lucem quam inhabitas.
Amen.

and here is an English translation:

The angelic bread
becomes the bread of men;
The heavenly bread
ends all prefigurations:
What wonder!
The Lord is eaten
by a poor and humble servant.

Triune God,
We beg of you:
visit us,
just as we worship you.
By your ways,
lead us where we are heading,
to the light in which you dwell.
Amen.